Editing Setting:CATastrophe/Settlements (section)

===Sierra Arky Pelligoe===
<small>''created by Maestro''</small>

A chain of islands located between 35º and 40º north latitude, and 120º to 122º west longitude (somewhere in the China).  Some of the islands are merely small mounds or spires of rock and sand, barely rising above water level at high tide. Residents on these smallest islands have houses built on stilts around these high points -- they know where the islands come closest to the water's surface without actually breaching it, and the stilts usually are metal poles driven deep into the rock just underwater. Each of these smaller settlements may have anything from eight to two dozen Kemomimi living there; it is rare for them to possess any electrical equipment that is not powered by human energy, so to speak -- pedaling a bicycle chassis hooked up to a battery in order to recharge it, for example.

The larger islands are rather steep and mountainous, featuring some trees not to be found anywhere else in the Endless Blue. There are not many wide-open places where large settlements of Kemomimi can gather, and as a result the entire chain of islands houses less than four thousand full-time citizens. The largest group, however, have settled in the largest island available, a tall and massive crag of rock called Witnie Island; a community of three hundred Kemomimi dwells either on the peaks of the island or in a system of tunnels driven through the rock below. (Rumor has it that the tunnels took 110 years to carve.) Racks of salvaged solar panels hang on the cliffs, facing in the direction of the prevailing sunlight (southward); a small forest of rudimentary, homemade wind turbines provides supplementary power.

There is one ruined house on the east end of the island, at its highest peak, that is hundreds of years old -- the first settlers found it already standing when they arrived. Smithson House, as it is called, was carefully renovated (it was in need of a new roof, among other things), and is now the house of Arky Pelligoe's governor.