Hivenest

The Hivenest is an artificially created planet and the capital of the Lion Kingdom. The entirety of the planet has been made into a city fit for gods, with artificial sunlight bathing even the lowest levels in warm light, and the Hivenest's core is home to the Core Palace, where the royal family of the Lion Dynasty has dwelled for countless years. Every noble family in the Lion Kingdom calls the Hivenest home, and such enormous amounts of wealth have concentrated here that its radiance and luxury is positively blinding, even to Space creatures. Only the richest can afford to live in the Hivenest, but the most luxurious regions of the Hivenest are so wealthy that in comparison the average Hivenest resident is a poor peasant, and even the poorest regions of the Hivenest would be considered luxurious anywhere else.

Sectors
Due to the Hivenest's naturally impossible size and mass—both larger than the planet Jupiter in Blue Earth's solar system—necessity demands it be divided into sectors, otherwise everyone would be hopelessly confused. Note, however, that each sector is further subdivided into many thousands of layers, to make the most of the space.

As a general rule of thumb, the lower sectors in the Hivenest are richer than the upper sectors. As you travel downwards, the artificial sky gets higher, allowing for bigger and taller grandiose buildings, there is more open space, and there is more greenery.

Elevators
The Sectors are connected together by giant holes armed with gravity manipulators and thousands of real elevators. These are known simply as the Elevators, although it is far more complex than that. Pedestrians board massive elevators and go from level to level. Vehicles and the largest Space creatures throw themselves down the holes, where the gravity manipulators slow their fall to avoid harm and gently lower them onto their destination. Passports are required to enter and exit the Hivenest, similar to a human airport.

Crust Decks
The crust decks are the thick layer of (almost) solid rock between each of the Hivenest's sections. These crust decks are hundreds of miles thick, and are almost totally solid except for life support system pipes, gravity engines, and shield generators.

Orbital Sphere
The Orbital Sphere, as its name suggests, is composed of the Hivenest's upper atmosphere and higher orbit. It is totally composed of an enormous spaceport, as well as several million separate, much smaller space stations (though they are still very large). The spaceport is made up of several space elevators at the Hivenest's equator, which transport goods from the Orbital Sphere to other Spheres, and vice versa. The space elevators connect to the Hivenest's orbital ring, which makes up the majority of the spaceport. The spaceport also includes many docking areas where trading ships, starliners and other space vessels can dock and their crew can disembark, and cargo can be unloaded, and vice versa. The spaceport is mainly meant for cargo ships, though, and has several designated areas where cargo ships dock and cargo can be unloaded or loaded through the use of extremely powerful and precise gravity manipulators. The Orbital Sphere's spaceport also contains many military zones where Imperial Battlecruisers are docked, sleeping and waiting for the time when they'll wake. These military zones are also heavily armed and shielded, and manned by Imperial Police. The Orbital Sphere also contains several shield generators which can project an almost indestructible shield that covers the entire Hivenest, Orbital Sphere included.

Notable Locations:

 * Spaceport
 * Docked Imperial Battlecruisers
 * Shield generators
 * Imperial Police Shipyards

The Surface Sphere
The Surface Sphere makes up the surface of the Hivenest, and is the smallest sector. Most of it is comprised of nature preserves and national parks. As such, the Surface Sphere is the only natural sector, and is mostly inhabited by wild animals. There are, however, some interesting locations, such as the homes of a few eccentric Space creatures who chose to live on the Surface Sphere to enjoy the real sunlight and magnificent nature, and also the (heavily guarded) Junewood portal, which leads to the pocket world of Junewood. The Surface Sphere is also the most human-friendly of the Hivenest's sectors, despite having the lowest human population. The only industralized areas of the Surface Sphere are where the space elevators from the Orbital Sphere plunge into the Hivenest's depths into the lower sectors.

Notable Locations:

 * Junewood Portal
 * Rust Wheel Nature Preserve

The Outer Sphere
The Outer Sphere is the most industrialized area of the Hivenest. The vast majority of the Hivenest's foundries, factories, warehouses, etc. are located here. Raw materials from the Orbital Sphere, transported there by vast cargo ships, are sent to the Outer Sphere's foundries where they mass-produce everything the Hivenest's citizens could possibly want, such as electronics, eating utensils, etc. The Outer Sphere also contains most of the Hivenest's greenhouses and thus produces the most food. The Outer Sphere is the largest of the Hivenest's sectors and has the highest population by far, along with all that entails. The Outer Sphere contains many sprawling semi-suburban neighborhoods (where the houses are so large they could be considered mansions by human standards but are quite small by Space creature standards), large clusters of colossal apartment skyscrapers, and gigantic supermarkets that sprawl for dozens of miles. The Outer Sphere is also known for having less reputable regions where criminals gather, but these are patrolled by Imperial Police.

Notable Locations:

 * Brachio Academy
 * Titanaz Supermarket Complex
 * Holtezen Industrial Center
 * Lokkis-heim Market

The Middle Sphere
The Middle Sphere is the second-largest sector of the Hivenest and most of the Hivenest's upper-class citizens live here. The Middle Sphere is essentially the same as the Outer Sphere, but much fancier and with a much lower number of industrial districts. Here the houses are so large they dwarf even human mansions. The Middle Sphere is also home to the largest Space creature arena in the entire universe, the Colosseum, which is similar to the human Roman Colosseum but literally tens of thousands of times larger. The Super Can is held at the Colosseum every hundred years. The Middle Sphere also houses Filmwood, which is the Space creature's largest film-making center, essentially Hollywood but on a much larger scale. The Middle Sphere also has many more parks than the Outer Sphere does, and the parks are larger.

Notable Locations:

 * Colosseum
 * Filmwood

The Inner Sphere
The Inner Sphere is the third-smallest sector in the Hivenest and is home to some of the city's richest citizens. It has a high police presence, though the crime rate is quite low. Some of the universe's most famous casinos are located here in the Inner Sphere, and many Imperial Police and military bases are also located here. The Inner Sphere, like the Middle Sphere, is essentially like the Outer Sphere but even fancier than the Middle Sphere. Here the houses are so large they're basically palaces, and the parks are gigantic, sprawling, and even have mountains. Some parks are even meant to simulate real nature and are left deliberately untended so they're as "wild" as possible. Many of the Hivenest's financial districts are also located here.

Notable Locations:

 * Muezen Commercial Center
 * Hexagon Vault-Bank

The Core Sphere
The Core Sphere refers not only to the Hivenest's actual core, which is entirely occupied by the Core Palace, but also the deepest layers around it. Here the residential and commercial districts are replaced by vast complexes of buildings, where the Lion Kingdom's biggest megacorporations keep their headquarters. There are, of course, vast palaces where the Lion Kingdom's lesser nobles live, vast parks even larger than those in the Inner Sphere for the nobles to relax in, huge recreational facilities, arenas, etc. And then, there is the Core Palace itself. Nestled in the very core of the Hivenest, heat radiates off it, and it is closely guarded with only a single entrance. Most people don't have the authorization required to go anywhere interesting in the Core, as most places here are private and reserved for the nobles that live here or the employees who work in the megacorporation headquarters located here; only the parks are open to the public, and even then, most of the lesser ones are private and only for the nobles.

Notable Locations:

 * Core Palace
 * Li'l Bear Inc. HQ
 * Anomalyus Research Center
 * Steggy Inc. HQ
 * Hammer Industries HQ
 * Li'l Liony Inc. HQ

Infrastructure
The Hivenest is a massive city, and thus requires a great deal of specialized infrastructure.

Life Support
The Hivenest's life support facilities are colossal complexes that keep everything necessary for life in the Hivenest up and running.

Water Purification and Recycling
The water purification and recycling sections of the Hivenest's life support facilities are totally dedicated to reclaiming water wherever possible and then purifying it to make it drinkable. Any steam from evaporated water is collected by moisture harvesters embedded in the artificial sky and then sent to the closest functioning life support facility, where it's cooled to liquid form and processed to cleanse it of impurities. The water reclamation part also ties in with the waste management part of the life support facility, extracting water from urine, garbage, feces, and wastewater and purifying it to make it drinkable again. About 99.99% of the water in the Hivenest is recycled; the rest is imported from other planets.

Waste Management
The waste management sections of the Hivenest's life support facilities, as their name suggests, manage waste. They extract anything they can from urine, feces, and wastewater, and send it to the water purification and recycling section to be purified. As for the rest, it gets incinerated and evaporated, and the remains are sent to the Orbital Sphere where it's chucked into space, far away from the Hivenest. Garbage is collected by large garbage hovertrucks and sent to the waste management sections of the life support facilities, where anything that can be recycled is sent to the Outer Sphere's foundries to be made into whatever is needed at the moment, anything compostable is sent to the Outer Sphere's greenhouses to be used as fertilizer, and anything that is neither recyclable nor compostable is, again, incinerated and evaporated and the remains chucked into space.

Air Purification
The air purification sections of the Hivenest's life support facilities operate through a variety of ways. All throughout the Hivenest, greenery is everywhere; plants are planted wherever there's space and many buildings have plants on their outside walls and balconies, along with vines, trees, etc. Some of the Hivenest's buildings are so covered by plants that their sides look totally green. These plants, of course, naturally turn carbon dioxide and the artificial sunlight into oxygen, which Space creatures need to breathe. Additionally, one of the secondary purposes of movie trees (see the section "Movie Trees") is to turn carbon dioxide into oxygen. However, this alone is not enough, since large Space creatures, of which there are many, consume much more oxygen than the plants produce. So there are also air purifiers embedded in the artificial sky which trap carbon dioxide and through complex chemical processes convert it to oxygen and waste carbon, then release the new oxygen (the waste carbon is sent to refineries to be made into something useful). Additionally, many life support facilities are surrounded by genetically engineered trees whose sole purpose is to turn carbon dioxide into oxygen, and do so much more efficiently than normal trees (however, they are uglier than normal trees, being thin and crooked, so they are not located anywhere else in the Hivenest).

Temperature Regulation
The temperature regulation sections of the Hivenest's life support facilities make sure the Hivenest doesn't get too hot or too cold. Cities, especially large ones, produce an enormous amount of heat. On most planets, the heat escapes into the countryside and disperses harmlessly. In the Hivenest, this is impossibly, as the entire planet is a city, even the insides. As such, extremely advanced temperature regulation systems are needed. Most of the temperature regulation system is dedicated to cooling the Hivenest, working in tandem with the air purification system to cool the recycled air to almost subzero temperatures and then release it, cooling the surrounding air.

Power Distribution
The power distribution sections of the Hivenest's life support facilities make sure the energy produced by the Hivenest's power plants (mostly located in the Outer Sphere's industrial zones) is evenly distributed throughout the megacity, although they do prioritize critical systems. If there is ever a blackout in the Hivenest (which, as far as anyone knows, has never happened) then the life support systems, gravity engines (see the section titled "Gravity Regulation"), public transport systems, shields, and artificial sky will be the last things to go off.

Movie Trees
In any plaza, town square, or other similar open area in the Hivenest, there will invariably be a movie tree. Movie trees are a form of genetically engineered oak trees, which have been engineered to become huge. However, they themselves do not produce enough energy to support themselves, so all movie trees have many pipes diving from the ground to the tree's innards, delivering the required nutrients to the movie tree so it doesn't starve to death. The primary purpose of movie trees is to deliver news. Movie trees have anywhere from 30-60 TVs attached to them, depending on their size. The TVs hang down from their lower branches (which are still hundreds of feet in the air) and display important news day and night. During holidays, movie trees even play holiday-themed movies. Movie tree TVs are also programmed to display Imperial announcements whenever Liony or one of the supreme heads of department delivers them. Additionally, one of the secondary purposes of the movie trees (other than to look nice) is to turn CO2 into oxygen.

Weather Control
Since the Hivenest is an artifical planet, and all of its inner Spheres (meaning, all the sectors except for the Orbital and Surface Spheres) have artificial skies, logically the Hivenest also has weather control. Weather control systems, as their name suggests, controls the weather. More than that, it also controls the day. Thus, in the Hivenest, there are 24 hour days and 12 hour nights (meaning, one full day is 36 hours long). Most of the time, weather control keeps the weather nice and summery and clear; warm but not too hot, the sky a bright blue with not a cloud in the sky, sunlight shining down everywhere—although, occasionally, the Space creatures who control the weather control systems decide to have a little fun and give the Hivenest a few weeks of rain or snow or fog, etc. Sometimes the season changes, too—most of the time it's a mix of summer and spring (since the plants on the Hivenest have, by now, adapted to its clear weather and bloom all year long) but for a few weeks each year it turns into autumn or winter, though since the plants have adapted to eternal summer by now the weather doesn't usually stray too far from its normal sunny summer day. During nighttime, the stars are fully visible in the sky, despite the fact that on a normal planet the light pollution from the Hivenest's buildings would have obscured them. The Hivenest's artificial sky also usually has two full moons about the same size as the sun appears to be, although of course, the sky and the sun and the moons are all just illusions of the artificial sky. Only on the Surface Sphere can you see the Hivenest's true sun, a blue supergiant, and see that the Hivenest has no moons and the stars are partially obscured by the colossal spaceport.

Gravity Regulation
Since the Hivenest is a colossal artificial planet, far larger both in size and mass than a typical gas giant, if left to its own devices it would naturally collapse under its own gravity and turn into a small star. It does not, however, have enough mass to turn into a neutron star or black hole. Thus, some sort of gravity regulation is needed to keep the Hivenest from being crushed under its own gravity. The Hivenest's colossal gravity engines, buried deep in the thick crust decks between the Hivenest's sections, make up the gravity regulation system. They are called gravity engines because they are actually titanic spaceship gravity engines that have been modified and repurposed to regulate gravity inside the Hivenest. They do, however, still retain their capability to move ships and if need be the Hivenest can be relocated by the gravity engines, although this would probably have catastrophic consequences. The gravity engines maintain an even pressure on the Hivenest's sections, ensuring the gravity everywhere is exactly the same (the only exception is the Orbital Sphere, where it is advantageous to have zero gravity so ships don't have to expend as much energy to keep themselves from being pulled into the Hivenest's gravity.)

Public Transport
The Hivenest is far too large for private transportation. There are so many people that if everyone owned their own private hovercar, the streets would be clogged with hover-vehicles and everyone would be hopelessly stuck in traffic. Thus, the Hivenest contains three forms of extremely advanced public transport.

Imperial Buses
The Imperial Buses are actually spaceships modified to fly in atmosphere. Because they are former spaceships, an Imperial Bus can reach speeds of thousands of miles an hour in only a few minutes, allowing for quick travel to and from Imperial Bus Stations. Also, each Imperial Bus is a relatively small former spaceship, but is still incredibly large and thus can carry hundreds of passengers. The Imperial Buses are also completely automated, and the only reason they have a bus driver is because the bus driver's actual job is to make sure the passengers don't sabotage the bus. Although Imperial Buses are programmed to only stop at Imperial Bus stations, in actuality, the bus can stop anytime and many passengers routinely ask to be let off at non-station stops and are frequently obliged.

Magrails
Magrail trains zoom on electromagnetic rails (thus the name, magrails) at thousands of miles per hour. They are less common than Imperial Buses because they do not have as much flexibility, as passengers can only (safely) get on and off at train stations. Additionally, they are less sturdy, and can carry less passengers than an Imperial Bus can. However, they do no require refueling as they tap directly into the Hivenest's energy grid, are less noisy, and are less prone to engine malfunctions, so they are still used frequently.

Walkways
If you just want to walk somewhere, you can. Even though the Hivenest is colossal and easy to get lost in, almost everywhere is accessible via foot or bicycle or any other small, people-powered vehicle. And of course, there are the Elevators, which use actual elevators and gravity manipulators to ferry people to and from different Hivenest sections

Private Transport
However, there is still private transport in the Hivenest. These are mainly in the form of company-owned vehicles (such as cheap knock-offs of Imperial Buses) that can carry employees to their office, or transport supplies to and from company buildings. There are also family-owned vehicles, as the Lion Kingdom government didn't totally ban private transport in the Hivenest—they just put a large tax on it, so most people decided it wasn't worth it. However, there are of course still people who did think it was worth it and got vehicle anyway despite the huge tax.

Before Recorded History
Although no currently alive being knows, the Hivenest was created an unfathomably long time ago by Builder Industries for the Wasp Empire. The planet served as the capital of a vast insectoid-controlled empire for trillions of years until its non-insectoid citizens became fed up with their oppression under wasp rule and revolted, led by Liony the Zeroth.

The bloody revolution was, surprisingly, a success and Liony the Zeroth and his revolutionary companions began to build their own empire. At this time, the Hivenest was constantly under attack, temporarily causing the Hivenest's Surface Sphere to go barren from all the orbital bombardment. However, the Hivenest was well defended and there was never any breach into the vast planet's inside spheres. The Hivenest slowly began gaining the wealth it has become known for today as Liony the Zeroth's empire expanded, funneling huge amounts of money into his capital. Eventually, the other Space creature kingdoms' attacks stopped, and the Hivenest became a center of interstellar trade due to its vast size and population.

Recorded History
The Hivenest retained its status as the universe's largest and most important trade center until this day, with only a few minor disruptions. The earliest written records found in the Hivenest are spaceport logs detailing the massive amount of cargo ships loading and unloading over a few weeks.

Although the Hivenest was attacked a few times during the First Conflict Era, its defenses destroyed the invaders before they even got close to the planets every time, and the other kingdoms eventually gave up trying to conquer it. The largest known disturbance the Hivenest has had was in the Beginning Era, when massve riots ensued over the controversial result of a massive sports match. The riots lasted an entire year before they died down on their own, and thousands of Space creatures Perma-died.