
Yesterday’s prompt and DeviantArt link.
An absence of snow on the land masses around Themis’ equatorial belt was one of the most noticeable differences between the Earth we’d left behind and this new home world of ours that we now called Themis. It seemed all continents and land masses on Themis, except for two, resided within the planet’s two tropical belts. The exceptions were two polar land masses, each the size of Antarctica from the Earth they left behind.
Recon flights dispatched, at first, from the Aldrin, and later, from our forward operating bases planetside, returned from the Arctica continent, the northern polar land mass as we named it, descriptions of some small coastal villages, some of the village architecture we’ve come to associate with the troll tribes, and a lot of ice and snow.
Of the four flights sent over Arctica, descriptions became scarcer as the Gemini pilots flew over the center regions. Clouds and weather reduced visibility to nothing. Nightvision couldn’t get a clear view and what infrared could see splotches of cold and warm appeared on the FLIR screen, which of course told us nothing.