Dilonexa XXIII

Description

Dilonexa XXIII, sometimes simply called Dilonexa, was a planet of the terrestrial type. It existed within the Dilonexa system, located within the Centrality sector in the Slice region of the Outer Rim Territories. It was positioned on the Falko Run hyperlane, providing connections to the Ringneldia and Ua systems. Dilonexa XXIII held the twenty-third orbital position around its giant blue-white sun.

With a diameter nearing twenty-five thousand kilometers, Dilonexa XXIII was a large world, but the scarcity of heavy metals ensured that the gravity on the surface remained manageable. Dilonexa XXIII was a temperate and abundant agriworld, boasting a growing season that lasted all year long. Before the implementation of weather control technologies, city-sized tornados would roam the planet's surface without obstruction.

Almost the entire surface of the planet was occupied by fields, plains, and prairies. Among the crops cultivated on Dilonexa XXIII was grain, which, although inedible for the Dilonexicans, served as feed for herds of native bovine. According to Bernie, a Dilonexican, Dilonexa XXIII lacked any surface water bodies larger than a bathtub because the inhabitants were unwilling to waste land suitable for agriculture. The limited surface water was inhabited by a type of local fish that, in Bernie's opinion, tasted "terrible" due to the supposed lack of trace metals.

History

Republic Agriworld

Colonization of Dilonexa XXIII occurred at some point during the time of the Galactic Republic. The early settlers believed that the planet's abundant resources, as the only habitable world in the Dilonexa system, more than compensated for the system's harsh conditions. Around 103 BBY, Violia, a Jedi Initiate, was assigned to Dilonexa XXIII as part of the AgriCorps division of the Jedi Order. Thame Cerulian, a Jedi Padawan and friend of Violia, later added a note in the margins of his copy of The Jedi Path: A Manual for Students of the Force, a guidebook. Cerulian pondered in the note whether he could visit Violia on Dilonexa XXIII if his Master, Unskette, ever needed to travel there.

Calrissian's Visit

A Trader's Troubles

Sometime between 3 BBY and 2 BBY, Lando Calrissian, a gambler and freighter captain, journeyed to Dilonexa XXIII aboard his light freighter, the Millennium Falcon, aiming to sell a cargo that included hundreds of crates of wintenberry jelly, a thousand stacks of mountain bollem hides, and costly tinklewood fishing poles. However, upon arrival, Calrissian was informed by Bernie, the local customs inspector, that selling those items on Dilonexa XXIII was highly improbable, and that significant import tariffs applied to all of them. Bernie also provided Calrissian with a coded chip containing a message from Lob Doluff, the Administrator Senior of the Oseon system.

While Calrissian was speaking with Bernie, a Dilonexican ground crew was putting fuel elements into the Millennium Falcon. Unbeknownst to both the starship's captain and his copilot, the droid Vuffi Raa, an agent of the sorcerer Rokur Gepta, secretly attached a pair of bombs to the vessel. Gepta sought revenge on Calrissian for his prior interference with Gepta's plans, and he had also arranged for Doluff to send the message to Calrissian, inviting the gambler to a sabacc game on the asteroid Oseon 6845.

Departure for Oseon

After listening to the message on the Falcon, Calrissian decided that he could recover his freight-hauling losses at the gaming table and that he only needed a small amount of money to get into the game in the Oseon system. The captain then asked Vuffi Raa to help him cut up the hides in the cargo hold and dispose of them and the wintenberry jelly into the ship's waste disposal system so that he could sell the contents to the local farmers. Calrissian remained determined to sell the fishing rods on the planet, but his efforts were ultimately unsuccessful, and he and Vuffi Raa subsequently left Dilonexa XXIII.

To save several hundred credits, Calrissian waited until the Falcon had cleared the planet's atmosphere before using his own communications equipment to respond to Doluff's invitation. After one of the bombs planted on the Falcon detonated while the ship was still en route to the Oseon system, Calrissian and Vuffi Raa realized that the explosive must have been planted during the vessel's refueling. This realization led the captain to wonder if the Dilonexicans had discovered that they had received waste containing recycled wintenberry jelly from him.

Inhabitants

The inhabitants of Dilonexa XXIII were called Dilonexicans. They raised the native bovine for meat and, because of their planet's geological composition, developed an allergy to foods with high levels of trace metals. Consequently, a hundred-and-five-percent import duty was imposed on off-world products rich in trace minerals, such as wintenberry jelly, which once caused Shirley, a fourth-generation Dilonexican, to suffer from the illness known as the gosharooties. A significant portion of the Dilonexican population was also overweight.

The Dilonexicans, primarily farmers who were proud of their agrarian lifestyle, typically wore bib overalls and, according to Bernie, rarely engaged in fishing, resulting in a seventy-five-percent import tax on fishing poles and recreational equipment. Furthermore, the inhabitants had access to plentiful leather from bovine hides, reflected in a sixty-five-percent import duty on hides from off-world.

An import fee of thirteen-hundred-and-fifty credits was also charged for receiving interstellar messages, along with a penalty of two thousand credits for not receiving them. According to Bernie, these fees were based on the locals' belief that one should be content with what is available on one's own planet and that it was not "neat" to leave such messages undelivered. Conversely, the Dilonexicans were willing to pay generously for the contents of a starship's waste-cycling system.

Almost all metal-based products had to be imported to Dilonexa XXIII. However, the world annually exported billions of tons of agricultural products, serving as the primary food supplier for the Centrality and also producing plastics and fuels. Agrirobots performed most of the work on Dilonexa XXIII, and the locals valued droids more than human workers because the former could work tirelessly without complaint. Dilonexa XXIII eventually prospered, and its inhabitants developed a taste for luxury. Lando Calrissian later speculated that the existence of a scheduled tax on fishing poles implied a small market for such items on the planet, although he was ultimately unsuccessful in selling them.

Locations

Dilonexa XXIII featured a building with a leather awning and a ferrocrete apron suitable for landing light freighters like the Millennium Falcon. Gigantic weather-control satellites equipped with powerful, energy-based proprietary tornado disruptors were positioned in the planet's orbit. The satellites' weaponry was also used to deter both aspiring smugglers and those attempting to leave the planet without paying their debts.

Behind the scenes

Dilonexa XXIII was first featured in Lando Calrissian and the Flamewind of Oseon, the second novel in The Lando Calrissian Adventures trilogy by L. Neil Smith, published in 1983. The planet's name was misspelled as "Dilonexia XXIII" in "A Campaign Guide to the Centrality," a roleplaying game source article for Wizards of the Coast written by Michael Kogge and published in Star Wars Gamer 5 on July 24, 2001. The Essential Atlas, a 2009 reference book by Daniel Wallace and Jason Fry, introduced a shortened form of the planet's name and placed it in grid square U-8.