Voruna

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Voruna is a hot, humid world. The environment is conducive to a rainforest variety and density of life. The world has only small bodies of water, nothing that could really be called an ocean; almost all of the water on the planet is in the saturated atmosphere or small bodies of water.
In the last few thousand years, Vorans have transformed their planet. Predators are rare now, confined to zoos and reserve land. Vorans have built aquaduct-like structures to capture the humidity in the air and utilize it as drinking water, allowing them to expand beyond the few bodies of water around which they initially evolved. Overall humidity of the planet has dropped somewhat from its natural state, prompting some environmentalist Vorans to grow concerned about continued expansion and overpopulation of the species. Among other things, this helped prompt a mass migration to several other planets in the system—some already habitable, some made so by Voran technology.

During Storms

All life that evolves on Voruna must necessarily have some means of protecting itself against scalding temperatures during the global "storms", a phenomena triggered partly by the increased luminosity of the Cepheid Variable star. Solar radiation increases dramatically for several days, the temperature rises, and humidity at the surface plummets to near zero as water vapor shifts to the upper atmosphere. In addition, a number of toxic chemicals are stirred up from underground by the evaporating water.
Most of the planet goes into a sort of protective hibernation during this time. Many species burrow underground; some build their own structures or take advantage of previously built ones. Certain predators evolved to flourish in the storms, hunting and digging for burrowed creatures. Recent ancestors of the Vorans evolved the single large entity which can shield the other ones from both the storms and the predators that accompany them: the Queen.