Ta'a Chume'Dan

The city of Ta'a Chume'Dan was the administrative capital of the Hapes Consortium. A small, neat city of only a few hundred thousand inhabitants, it was nevertheless the hub of governmental, commercial and legal activity for the entire Hapes Cluster, due to laws requiring all major business to be done on Hapes itself.

The name Ta'a Chume'Dan means "Queen Mother's Residence" in Hapan, and the most remarkable sight in the city was the royal palace of Star Home, a fairy-tale castle perched on the black basalt crag that dominated the settlement. In fact, Star Home was a magnificent interstellar starship, and the crag had been crafted to serve as its surface landing point.

In spite of the name and the presence of Star Home, however, Ta'a Chume'Dan was only intermittently a royal residence, even when the Queen Mother was on the homeworld. When they were on the planet, the monarch and her court spent much of their time at rural residences such as Per'Agthra. Whether the crag was empty, or whether it was crowned by Star Home, it served primarily as a symbol of the monarchy's grandeur and power to the administrators and bureaucrats of the population - as Ta'a Chume'Dan itself served a symbolic and administrative role for the worlds of the Consortium.