Starplant

The Straplant was a small flower that originated from the Chin'tassi homeworld of Chin'tassia (also known as Chin'tassi Prime), and was known primarily for its ability to be harvested as an extreme narcotic drug.

Biology
The Starplant was so called because the look of the plant rather resembled a generic look of a star, pointed at each edge in stark white petals. It had a black stem from which the white petal head perched on. Inside the plant lurked a small budding area where a cluster of its seeds were held, rather like the poppy plant that used to be grown on the planet Earth. Adorned across the leaves are black lines, with spots on either side of the lines, leading down to the central bud where the seeds are contained.

The leaves held the secret of the drug, as when burnt the inner juices contained inside the leaves transformed it into a purple powder, with small finely compressed shining white granules, rather resembling small diamonds, that sometimes twinkled in the light. From this was derived the drug Stardust, a powerful, highly addictive substance that sold for millions of kareshes on the intergalactic market.

The starplant was an incredibly common growing flower on Chin'tassia, little to no different to a common weed. This made it extremely populous in growth, and whole fields of the plant could be found growing almost everywhere there were clement weathers and long stretches of grasslands, mounds and hills.

History
The Starplant, due to its incredibly widespread growth and its known narcotic properties, made it one of the most troublesome plants every encountered by the Golden Dawn of Gaia, and indeed to wider police authorities after the Empire's collapse. Vast bounties of cash could be made from the harvesting of stardust from the plant, and its common growth meant it was virtually impossible to curtail or regulate its use by Chin'tassi Firelords. Firelords would grow vast groves of the plants, harness its narcotic effects and use the money generated both internally on Chin'tassia and intergalactically (often through the Felinor criminal groups, such as "Gingey Whiskers" Scarlioni, and various pirate groups, who sold the drugs on the offworlds en-masse).The Firelords would cultivate the plants and the drugs inside them as a means of make money, buying arms from the outside Chin'tassia to use against other firelords in intensive internecine tribal conflicts. Or, alternatively, cultivation of the drug was used by Firelords resistance fighters to pay for arms in battles against Human imperial forces.

The plant spread from just being grown on Chin'tassia to the four Chin'tassi "Dominion" worlds, and indeed, to almost anywhere the plant could grow (such as in potted plants on Wormworld, with exported Chin'tassia soil). This meant attempts to try and stamp down on the plant's growth were nigh-on impossible. Not, however, that stopped the authorities, who held sieges and busts of people growing the plants in secret greenhouses in attics and basements (on places like Wormworld and Arcadia). On Chin'tassia, human authorities went about trying to stop the growth of the plant in two ways, often depending on the relative tolerance or racism of the respective Emperor or Empress. One was mass destruction. Vast fields, known to be harvesting sights for Chin'tassia firelords, were burnt with flamethrowers, whole sections of grasslands set alight to kill dead the plants growth. Due to both its commonality, and also the extreme fightback this often brought from the locals, who, remember, considered them semi-sacred, this was considered a brutally effective, yet also essentially pointless task. The other approach was one of pragmatism. Some Emperors, such as Lawrenschank, knew it was impossible to rid of the drug entirely, and so let certain local chieftains who were clients of the Empire grow them under "empire protected" zones, in the hope that by encouraging the growing of some of the flowers they could divest their efforts onto rebellious or troublesome Firelords. In this sense, favoured tribal leaders were given the right for a blind eye to be turned to the drug making, as long as the profits derived from the sale of the drug was internal to Chin'tassia, went through only sanctioned means of sales (no criminal gangs) and a huge chunk of them were given to the Empire.

Although sensible in practice, the turn the other cheek strategy of this approach did little to stop the tidal wave of illegal, illicit drug trade, and the mass flow of arms it would buy into Chin'tassia. The presence of Humanity onto Chin'tassi soil and space essentially made it a self-fulfilling prophecy, as the only way the drug would stop being pimped would be if the reason for the drug being made (aka, gaining arms in wars) was ended, which, as long as Humanity had a strong presence inside Chin'tassia and continued to occupy their space as part of the empire, made it inevitable they would cultivate it. Also, the divide-and-conquer policy the Empire fostered onto Chin'tassia, playing tribes against one another, also made it inevitable jealous and bitter tribal Firelords would grow the plant, the enormous and easy-to-get bounties derived from the plant being irresistible to those desperate to win battles.

The plant itself was the cause of unending amounts of conflicts amongst Chin'tassi tribes, especially those of the more grassy, earthy areas of the central plain of Korradass (the only continent on Chin'tassia), often squabbling amongst themselves over who owned farmlands where the plant was grown, fighting and killing for ownership of the larger fields. The plant was instrument in the first major crisis to effect the Lawrenschank regime in the late 2980s, in the events of the Tin-Pot Emperor's Plot, and the wider Chin'tassi Drugs Scandal that rocked the Empire during that time. Innumerable local viceroys were taking huge personal, private payments of the drug trade, actively promoting it to certain clients and taking massive rewards in the process. Initially presumed to be only localised to the administrators and generals inside Chin'tassia and its neighbouring space, it turned out to be almost every major figure in the Human civil service, military and political elite, including most especially the House of Foxglove, who were dependent on the drug trade to fund its arm sales against the Royal family in a hoped-for coup. In a tit-for-tat deal, the head of House Foxglove and local viceroy for that area of space, Kuma Lisa Foxglove, made a deal with the local drug kingpin and notorious firelord, Tem-ak-Daaltrassi (the so called "Burnt Maniac" of the Daal-trassi), owner of a huge grove of Starplants hidden in the depths of the Forest of Thorns, that in return for supplies of the drug and the money that came with it, he would kidnap the son of the Emperor on a trip to the planet, ransom the child in return for the Emperor's abdication, and be made King of Chin'tassia after Kuma Lisa was appointed as Empress.

It turned out to so widespread that even the Emperor's brother, the Vice-Admiral of the entire Human Navy, Valdrada Vanandagr, was part of it, an active addict, so far gone he had actually had his nose synthetically replaced to cover up the effect of the drug's acidic burning of the facial features from prolonged usage, although this was only found out after Lawrenschank's death, and exposed by the Empress Nymphella during her victory over Valdrada in the aftermath of the inter-dynastic civil war, the War of the Wolves. The scandal caused the purging of hundreds of thousands of military officers, civil buruecrats and political members of the States-General, and was a serious cause of the weakening of Lawreschank's claim to legitimacy, the discrediting of the old elite, and the opening of the door to Savonarola Pierrepoint's radical, extreme Human Supremacist "reforms", all under the guise of fighting supposed 'corruption' from the drug trade scandal.

After Chin'tassia's independence from mankind, during the Chin'tassi War for Planetary Liberation and subsequent liberation during the end of the War of a Thousand Worlds with the signing of the Treaty of Abawontooloo and subsequent Accords, sales of the plant's drug went to an all time low, the need for its produce no longer being so apparent as Humanity were gone, and tribal conflicts largely ended thanks to the powerful and unifying leadership of Ta'lissia Dal-Trassi. Criminal gangs such as the Scarlioni Family had to move onto to other drug sources to accommodate the drop in production, such as the creation of artificial drugs such as Nova. However, when Ta'lissia died, and tribal wars sparked up again, the trade continued, albeit it at a much slower pace.

The flower was also signfigant in the case of the "Happy Harry", or "Wormworld Slasher" murders during the year of 2899. As part of the Happy Harry murderer's crimes, flowers would be placed in the head of some of the women he would murder. While on some of them were white lillies (representing a Human plant), and on others were leaves from the Haloradean Colourswirl Plant, two of them had Starplants. This clearly part of a ploy by the Wormworld Slasher to defect attention from the Wormworld Calvarly finding him, leading onto a dead-end search for various other racial groups as the culprit, knowing the notoriously racist and largely all Human Wormorld police of that time, still operating under systems of racial profiling and discriminatory stop-and-search policies, would be more willing to follow those leads than to a Human. The sight of the flower at the scene of the crime, the accompanying note full of anti-Human sentiment sent to police headquaters and the subsequent police witchunt against Qintrassa dil'Nassi, a local pimp and violent abuser of prostitutes, accused of the crimes and falsely executed in a miscarriage of justice, ended up causing the Wormworld Race Riots of that year. The true killer still remains unknown to this day.

Culture
Due to the unusual look of the plant, and it's narcotic effects, the plant was considered somewhat sacred and holy to the Chin'tassi. In years of old the plant was cultivated around religious shrines to the Fire Moon god Kiliss Chin'drassi, and it could be seen adorned across pot plants and sites of holy importance, especially during important Chin'tassi holidays such as Tyrantsburn Eve, the Chin'tassi New Years Day, and to the the Four Days in dedicated to Kiliss Chin'drassi and his two brothers and sisters, known as Kiliss Chinn'drassi's Victory, Kall-drissi's Day, Tem-Tissi's Night, Shri-Tassi's Day and the Feast of Malokk-dal Krassi. To Humanity, by contrast, the plant was despised, not just because of the effects it caused in the drug trade, but also because it's pale, white flowers and black stem were seen to be ill, sickly, abnormal, something wrong. Human beings called it a variety of terms damming the plant, such as the "demon flower", "the five pointed menace", and frequently simply referring it as the grim "blightblooms", flowers that should not have been grown, and carried only with them death, chaos and mayhem.

Cornelius J. Rike, the famous and celebrated poet of the Empire, in his magnus opus epic poem "Light Me a Little Lamp", gives a vivid description of the plant, it's effects, and is a good representation of mankind's view of the plant during that period:

"Look there, as line upon line of Starplants bristle in the breeze

''Creation’s most demonic flower? You would, no doubt, say, ‘oh please’.''

‘Such a sweet and delicate thing, how could it cause such trouble?’

Look further into its little petals, they reveal it all

Its charred, blackened, burnt stem, its bleached, pale bone-white petal flower

Grotesque in form, the most sickly looking plant, it can be said

As if a black and oily arm grips onto a life-drained head

The arm as black as howling night, its petals spectre-white

Spread without pause through countryside, like some malignant blight

It sits there patiently, for the addict to come and stay

To the narcotic alter he has come before it to pray

And hack off its white petals, to access what’s lurks under

And a monstrous laugh emerges, as quick as night thunder

For ol’ Starplant has a new puppet to add another string

It makes him dance to its own tune, look how it makes him sing

Men sit on fortunes richer than some kings

By turning folk into the plant’s playthings

Crops are burnt and villages ransacked

And new born babes are senselessly attacked

Women are raped and their husband shot

And the Starplant’s puppet’s brains start to rot

Their nose falls off, their eyes start to bleed

But to these warning signs they pay no heed

This crop, an economy onto itself

Pimped by Felinor gangsters in sharp suites

and Chin’tassi firelords in hot pursuits

Of the piles of cash it can generate

to the drug they all circumambulate

To its beckoning call to prayer its acolytes do prance

To the court of the Starplant another lost soul has come to dance.

To midnight drenched Chin'tassi Prime we leave

For us, a most desirable reprieve..."

ppgs-45-49, Barnard's Star Publishers Edition, 3045.