Irichan is an alternate steampunk Pern site that's darker than most Weyrs like to go. If interested, contact me. It's got crazy religion and awesome machines and a guy with hair down past his ass. We'd love to have you!
Pern was a beautiful world when they found it. It was clean, pure, good. Those who founded the colonies set out to create an agrarian society in which every man could be free of the boundaries of religion and war. This was where all were equal to work and live as they chose, a low-tech society that would free them of wars with alien races such as the Nathi.
It would be odd for them not to look at history and realize that would not last. Ignore the threat of Thread or the creation of the dragons; America was founded on the same principles of freedom and agriculture. And dragons being peaceful, wonderful creatures is just ludicrous. No race in the history of man has ever been able to avoid the essential truth of nature: murder. So long as man breathes, there will be war. And even if the founders didn't have religion, wouldn't it form slowly over the years? Philosophy has always been about, and I doubt people would be willing to just drop their beliefs because some aliens decided to attack them. As far as technology goes, people advance. We've always been builders, thinkers, and inventors.
Let's pretend that people on Pern aren't perfect. Let's pretend Pern has the same logic as Earth. Now, let's say Ruth and Ramoth and all those folk didn't exist, and when Aivas was discovered, he was hidden from the world by a dragonkind failing to hold a candle to the standards of new industrial technology. Let's say dragons aren't exempt from human or animal faults, and that people build cities using the power of their minds. Let's say Anne McCaffery's utopia was crushed by the destructive qualities of human nature, or that William Golding, Jack London, Stephen Crane, and the Suspension of Disbelief Fairy got together and decided to rain on the Happy Parade.
This, my friend, is Irichan's Pern.
Rabastre was a horrible place to live. There was no way of getting around it: no one wanted to be there, except for the upper class and the businessmen who swindled their way around the city's many proletarians. Its streets were cobbled brick, charred with the flame throwers that got rid of the Thread that fell this late in the Pass. Thread was no longer as threatening as it used to be; the falls weren't heavy, lasting perhaps four hours every week or so in any given reason, and the flaming airships usually got rid of all of it. No, people no longer worried half as much as they used to, and that was why Rabastre existed.
Rabastre had three general areas: the industrial zone, the residential area, and the Lord's home, which also incorporated other noble residences. The residential area was on the south side of the Orul River, and the social ladder placed you in the poor areas, the middle-class areas, and the streets. The poor area is where our story begins. The streets are darkening, and men and women are shuffling in on foot or in street cars, shoulders slumped from days at the factory. The ikuzu are noticing the dark and smaller ones can be seen slipping out of the sewer grates. A woman stands in the doorway of one of the homes, waiting for her husband like she always did. Her eyes are far away as she strokes the pendant on her collarbone. It's too nice for a woman like her, and the neighbors know it. But she wears it anyway, a constant reminder of who owns her.
"Mom."
Alasta turns, tired eyes finding the slight figure of a girl no older than eleven turns. Her hair might have been blonde, but in the Rabastran filth it couldn't be determined. A skinny blue fire-lizard sits on her shoulder, watching Astara with his beady, jewel-toned eyes.
"He's not coming home," the girl says.
"I'm not waiting for him, Merope." But she's lying, and Merope can tell. It has been this way ever since the accident. Torek fell in the factories. The bosses didn't even have the decency to give them his final paycheck. Then Asterope left to find something better; Merope figured that she hadn't gotten her queen dragon, or if she had, she no longer cared about her mother and sister.
And Alasta turns back to the door every night, staring out until the streets are dark and no one wants to be outside. She is waiting, waiting for the slumped figure of her husband to tell her that he's not dead, or of the blonde, pretty face of her daughter to cry of her Impression to the finest Gold on Pern.
Most days, no one comes. And so, Alasta has whatever food Merope managed to scrape together from her job in the Lord's house and goes to bed, listening to her daughter cry herself to sleep in the next room. And so she would lie there, thinking of all sorts of things. Would Asterope come back? Was she even alive?
The Sun of the Church is on her wall, but Alasta doesn't believe that the Church will save her. She has it only because of R'ghu, and even then the bronze rider would not take her daughter to the Weyr. Little does she know that things will one day change...