Dabooldagad

Dabooldagad is a village on the planet Chooz. It is located in the Gogue desert, near Hiyat.

Dabooldagad is a place where an oasis and a volcano are uneasy neighbors, the volcano slowly stealing land from the oasis and turning its precious water into steam.

The village is very old, a hundred centuries old, some archeologists say, while others disagree and said it is two hundred or even five hundred centuries old. What they all do seem to agree on is that, whatever era it was when it was first settled, it lay in a lush tropical environment, in a fertile valley, perhaps even on the banks of some ancient river. The vast hot desert that dictates so much of the villagers' lives in this millennium did not exist yet in that one, and the lake of boiling rock that bubbled and sputtered beyond the cliffs at the edge of the village in modern times still lay under miles of bedrock, although the bedrock may have already been beginning to crack.

According to one theory, there had already been small fissures in the bedrock, and the hot volcanic gases had escaped upward through these fissures, and the frequent jungle rains had trickled downward through these same fissures, and when they'd met they'd created steam, and it was this steam that had first attracted some of the area's semi-nomadic primitives to settle here.

In time, lava had followed the steam through the fissures and flowed down the valley, perhaps meeting the river and turning its water suddenly to vapor in a loud, popping, hissing collision. Eventually, the thin crust of rock on the surface was worn away too much to bear its own weight, and it collapsed and melted and became part of the lake of lava it had sheltered. Now, east and north of the village are great dark cliffs ,and beyond those cliffs lay a plain of rock, rippled and cracked, mostly black and sometimes red, sometimes dark and sometimes erupting with fountains of scarlet that lit up the night.

The village has an odd name, because of its age. Almost without exception, villages, towns and cities have names that sound like the names of people. From the faraway bustling metropolis of Zoke to the little city of Hiyat where most of the villagers work and shop and find their connection with the world, municipalities are called by simple one-syllable names, a vowel or two or at the most three, closed on both ends by consonants. But the village, named in ancient times by speakers of a long-forgotten language, is called Dabooldagad.

There have been movements, over the centuries, to bring Dabooldagad into the modern era by truncating its name. Dab was proposed once, and Gad about a decade later. The last Zirode from Hiyat, the one before the present one, tried to force the name Bool on the village over the objections of its citizens. But he lost and they won, and the village remained Dabooldagad.

Modern Dabooldagad has about two hundred residents, who by reason of being wedged between the unforgiving desert and the punishing volcano, tend to watch out for one another and be, perhaps, more united, more of a real village in the old sense, than most.

Notable Residents Include:

 * Piper Craven
 * Gebb the magistrate
 * Kapp Vaigg