Varokka is a world in the Meon Cluster that merges with Sfal. In Sfal, the merges with Dahls and Varokka are merely 20 miles apart, so it was an obvious place for the first extra-sfalian settlement, away from Sfal’s sweltering heat and toxic atmosphere.

Varokka’s surface is 1/5 that of the Earth, mostly smooth with a few hill ranges, no mountains, and some freshwater lakes/small seas. The sky is beige, fully permeable to the light of Vhalfr for 12 hours, and dark for the next 10. The temperatures range between 20 and 25 degrees Celsius, with frequent, but not heavy rains.

Prior to the settlement most of the surface of Varokka was covered in forests and grasslands. The merge with Sfal is actually located between those two biomes. Near the edge of the world grow colossal trees, made up of hundreds of interwoven trunks reaching all the way to the skydome and seeping nutrients from The Outside. The tallest of the trees are many kilometers high. At the beginning of the settling, one juvenile tree (with just a single kilometer-high trunk) was felled to provide building materials for Varokka, Marka-na-Sfal and a few other settlements. However, before the lumberjacks managed to clear all the wood, the tree was infected by fast-growing mushrooms. Within days, the trunk became completely overgrown. As the retrieval of wood became too much hassle, people abandoned the project. They moved to cutting the lower trees, while the sawmills were mostly transformed into breweries for mushroom sauce. While less pungent than the condiment produced in Chaar, it was easier to make and closer, soon flooding the markets in the entire Meon Cluster and beyond.

Meanwhile, large swaths of grassland were transformed into fields and pastures. Tarvissian and Csivelinian humans were among the first farmers, which allowed them to secure the best locations, close to the merge with Sfal. Chaaite Chavikii focused on brewing mushroom sauce and experimenting with the edibility of local fauna. Nasikii took care of large hordes of cattle to feed the growing population of carnivorous species such as kas’sham.

Apart from mushrooms, two species of plants became important crops: Varokkan sugar palm provides sweet sap that can be added to water for a sweeter taste or refined into sugar, while varokkan blue yam is a popular snack, with palm-sized roots with alternating white-and-blue layers. Bakla tree was at one point grown for its oil, but it was discarded when the oil turned cancerogenic to humans.

Varokkan sugar palms – one of the few plants native to the Meon Cluster that became cultivated for food. They grow in the deep shadow of the colossal trees, therefore they evolved black bodies capable of absorbing all the light they can get. They also steal nutrients through parasitic roots. The blue spots at the tips of the branches are seed pods. They emit a faint glow as well as pheromones to attract animals. Once eaten, they are activated by digestive enzymes and start growing inside whatever animal has eaten them. New palms grow, feeding on the carcasses. People learned to imitate this process, activating the seeds with acid and feeding them copious amount of fertilizer. Luckily, the palms aren’t picky and can digest anything—except wood, as that is processed by Varokkan lightning-fast fungi. But the sugary sap of the palms is harvested and consumed as a syrup or processed into sugar.

Blue yam - a parasitic plant that grows on the roots of sky-trees. Some specimens are nothing but bulbs of starch that grow a single stalk with two flowers: masculine and feminine. The bulbs have alternating layers of white and blue flesh and black, scaly skin. Humans and vhariars can eat them after cooking, but for chavikii, naasiki and ssothians they are good raw. Only wild yams are collected and, as they need years to grow, the size of harvestable yams has declined over time. Historically, yams up to 1m in diameter were collected, while these days most are not bigger than two human fists.

Bakla - a tree renowned for its high content of oil. Initially, the oil was used for cooking, but after discovering its carcinogenic properties it was only harvested for industrial uses.