Planet: Aite

"Two beautiful moons, one spectacular ring, zero neighbors," says a popular advertisement for this Terminus Systems world. Aite is known for its sparsely settled population despite being a garden planet with a colony nearly a century old. Blessed with a mild climate, wildlife no more dangerous than that on Earth, and soul and bacteria amenable to imported plants, Aite would appear to be an unexplored paradise.

However, it is unpopular for two reasons. The first and most obvious is that its moon, Litae, is in an unstable orbit that will lead to a planetary impact and an extinction-level event within the next two centuries. As such, all investment in the planet is short-term, and the biggest business is selling off the local biota to the highest bidder.

The second drawback is the level of violence on the planet. Like the rest of the Phoenix Massing cluster, Aite was briefly considered part of Citadel space during its first wave of colonization. However, when the colony broke off to become an independent planet in 2133, the council let the doomed planet go with less than a day of debate. Free from a any real governing body, Aite's history has since been filled with wars between small-frontier town city-states over its resources. The result is a dangerous world where the average citizen is expected to be self-reliant to the point of fending for themselves against cutthroat corporations, strong-arm militia groups, and even geth incursions. The fighting is so frequent that the name of the planet itself has changed more than eleven times. In a sign of blunt indifference, standard Citadel galaxy maps refer to the world by the name given to it by human colonists in the latter half of the century.