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Stories of Amaranth (Please do not post here)

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A Brief History

Technology is interesting in that even things that have been made entirely obsolete can still be useful. Despite this, most people would expect transportation powered by fossil fuels is, in this year, either a quaint anachronism or an utter waste of resources.

As snooty as those sorts of people are, they'd be right, at least until they touch down on a planet with a particularly high concentration of natural gas and oil. Such is the story of the planet Aramanth. Originally the planet's rich iron and cobalt ore deposits made it a priority mining site. In a bit of a happy accident, however, one of the tunnel bores used to make a new shaft pierced the wall of an oil well. The result was quite messy and ended up ruining the tunnel bore's recently-applied coat of paint.

The result was also a storm of entrepreneurs sending down pumps and refinery equipment. The thick brush, rocky fields, tall grasses, and rolling hills of the better part of Aramanth's continents were particularly harsh on most of the dainty land vehicles they sent down. Cargo buggies didn't have the traction and were basically made of paper, seeing as they were designed primarily as a vehicle for traversing two dimensional space. The only reason they were used for Amaranthian expeditions is because they were exceptionally cheap, costing only an infinitely thin cross section of a Sirian Credit chip.

Hovercraft were equally out of the question since the first time someone brought one down to the surface of Aramanth, it was immediately hijacked by an Aramanthian Megasquirrel. It can occasionally be seen doing donuts on the edges of the drilling sites, with no less than three Megasquirrels in it at any time.

It is unknown why this happened, but it is speculated that the especially user-friendly control interface and acorny brown color of the hovercraft's paint were the main causes of its theft. Regardless, most of the entrepreneurs and their logistics staff just wrote them off as "too expensive."

As you might expect, the next logical thing (at least, according to four-state fuzzy-furry logic) was for the logistics staff to start ordering scrapped, junked, garaged, and museum'd pickup trucks from planet Earth, since of all pickup trucks in the galaxy, Earth's had at least two things better:

One, they were about four times more durable than the toughest-rated Cassiopeian Haul-O-Matic LandCruiser.
Two, they were slightly cheaper, even with shipping costs.

The people of Earth didn't even seem to mind much that alien entrepreneurs were coming down to take their old pickup trucks because they were rather entangled with Earth's most recent and most prosperous industries: infotainment holovideos, hoverboards, and pan-temporal prostitution.

And so the entrepreneurs called their logistics teams to call their crews to dig up every old beater, hauler, engine, muffler, transmission, axle, and piece of scrap metal they could find laying around, because their ever-growing fleet of junkers would most assuredly be needing maintenance.

Such is the tale of Aramanth's prosperity. Forthcoming shall be the tales of its people.
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