While some people began arguing over the exact wording of the IAU definition, and some people began re-litigating whether the IAU definition even applied to common and legal usage, others adopted an I'll-know-it-when-I-see-it attitude and began calling Earth and all the other planets BRTs (Big Round Things).

This caused enough of a fight that eventually the official listing of teleport destinations started referring to the BRT on which a polity resides as its "Planet, planetoid, or natural gravity source". This completely failed to settle the debate and satisfied nobody.

So the Fixipelago has, depending on how you count, somewhere between seven and seventeen planets. Here is a look at how they stack up.

Located close to the sun, with very little natural gravity, the six Mercuries are mainly useful for their place at the center of the solar system. Some infrastructure, including the solar-system logistics manager and the solar fixity field projectors live here. Three of the Mercuries also have backup servers, and therefore also come with an exclusion zone marking them completely off limits.

The other three Mercuries are home to a variety of high-frequency financial trading firms, that benefit from being close to the center of the solar system, with high-bandwidth fault-tolerant connections to the computers that do the accounting.

The Mercuries have the highest per-capita tax revenue of any planet, due to the low population and high land-value taxes on the real estate closest to the central accounting computers.

Venus is probably most famous for its thick, dangerous atmosphere. Other notable features include its retrograde rotation, large amounts of surface lava, and acidic rain.

Venus was not considered a particularly useful prospect for colonization, until somebody looked at the dark craggy rock, lashed by acid and blasted with gale-force winds, and said "this looks perfect for a boss battle."

Venus is now home to more than a thousand dark and craggy spires, looming out of the perpetual gloom and occasionally backlight by dramatic flashes of lightning. Guns and bombs are forbidden on the planet, but swords, crossbows, garrotes, nun-chucks, daggers, polearms, and contact poisons are encouraged. When you visit Venus, you can usually loot any of these you'd like off of your complementary starting NPC.

Between the ominous castles, there are occasionally other bits of interesting terrain: hidden valleys protected by powerful force-fields and carpeted with flowers; floating islands that trail fire-resistant vines across the unforgiving surface; forgotten century-old tombs (constructed last month); and more.

Despite humanity's general refusal to agree on anything, Venus has largely agreed on two different 'magic systems' that allow customizing and upgrading your weapons and armor, or casting 'spells' at dramatically appropriate moments. One is prominent in the north, with the other primarily located in the south. The equator forms a dangerous high-level no-magic zone, and is also (by invitation) the location of the annual DragonKinCon, and so is frequently inhabited by dragons.

Old Earth is much as it once was. By international agreement, the atmosphere is being gradually restored to levels of CO2 less generally toxic. Antarctica is inhabited by a complicated patchwork of utopian cities that moved out there to claim the last remaining unclaimed land on Earth.

As a result, the United Nations fails to recognize the Antarctic League, who fails to recognize them right back. For historical reasons, many of the resorts, towns, and other space stations in low Earth orbit are also members of the Antarctic League, although that is slowly changing over time.

As more and more space becomes available, prices on slots in orbit around Earth drop. Some Earth nations are taking the opportunity to buy up more and more of the orbital capacity, driving a steady continuing migration away from Earth.

Any description of Earth would hardly be complete without a mention of the Moon.

Luna is home to a variety of different polities, boasting the most sheer variety of any big round thing. Settlements are mostly built into dome cities scattered across the surface, although there is also an extensive tunnel network below the lunar regolith. Main centers of culture include the north and south poles (convenient for both the far and near sides), and the area around old Selenopolis in Mare Imbrium.

New Selenopolis is the largest non-Earth city, having earned itself the somewhat tongue-in-cheek name "the city of wonders". Some districts hold design competitions on varying schedules, continually changing their look, so you never know quite what you might find. The night-life in New Selenopolis is also beyond compare, since it's location on the moon means that evening dance parties can last 14 days.

New Selenopolis is also, while not the official capital of the Fixipelago (which does not have such a thing), home to a large number of people who work for various alliances, governments, charities, insurance companies, and other things that blur the lines between these. The business district, while calm and unchanging compared to some places in New Selenopolis, is always full.

The first artificial planet constructed, Antichthon is primarily composed of carbon. This gives it a lower average density, which in turn allows for a surface area slightly more than two times larger than Earth, while keeping Earth-standard atmosphere and gravity.

Antichthon is popular with everyone who wanted to live on a normal Earth-like planet while still escaping the political intrigue and power games of old Earth. Like Earth, it boasts a variety of different environments. However, the people who contributed to its construction were disproportionately fond of fjords, beaches, and mountains. Antichthon's coastlines are full of jagged prominences of land and tranquil hidden bays, making the view of the planet from space look a little like someone has wrapped the planet in barbed wire.

Due to its early settlement, including contributions from many factions, Antichthon has something for everyone. While mostly less fast-paced than the Lunar settlements, Antichthon boasts equal variety.

The presence of so many cinematic mountains also means that the skiing on Antichthon is unparalleled. Several mountain ranges were designed from scratch specifically for the purpose. Sometimes people who come to Antichthon for the skiing are seduced by the quiet, pastoral, counter-culture charm and find themselves carving out a new hidden valley somewhere in the mountains.

The island of Ishvar is home to a less doompunk fantasy scene than Venus. Approximately the size of Australia, Ishvar offers a complex and rewarding leveling system, a high-fantasy aesthetic complete with glowing plants, and dynamic quests. Traversable caverns of various kinds wind their way through the earth below the island. The deepest ones, below the central mountains, push through the last of the stone layer and into the diamond heart of Antichthon itself.

Antichthon's moon, Antiselene, is only sparsely inhabited. It is notable for hosting the largest mechanical computer ever built.

Mars is primarily controlled by the Green Mars Project, an attempt to colonize and terraform Mars with conventional technologies. Direct teleportation to the surface of the red planet is forbidden, but anyone is welcome to visit the border terminals at Phobos and Deimos, and take a conventional shuttle down to the surface.

With so little time to import additional water and atmosphere, the surface of Mars is still fairly uninhabitable. The main colonization effort is currently centered around the city of Olympus, at the foot of Olympus Mons. Colonization on the other side of the planet is currently restricted, because the other side of the planet is planned to be used for water ice drops.

Green Mars volunteers search through the asteroid belt for water-bearing asteroids, and bring them back by conventional rocketry. The Green Mars Project is on track to finish terraforming Mars in 2615.

Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system. Being a gas giant, the surface is not directly habitable. However, Jupiter boasts a stunning number of moons and artificial satellites. The most notable is perhaps Europa.

Europa is home to a fantastic liquid water ocean. Heated partly by radioactive elements in the moon's core, and partly by tidal heating from Jupiter, Europa's ocean is 60 kilometers deep in some places.

Although people once hoped to find life there, scientists are now quite sure that it is barren. Still, some people like the idea of floating in a cold, endless sea, and so Europa now plays home to several underwater settlements. Residents of Europa are also the most likely in the solar system to adopt body mods for living underwater. While many residents of Earth and Antichthon's oceans do the same, it is nearly universal for residents of Europa to at least get webbed fingers or toes and some better low-light vision so that they can venture beyond the safe walls of their cities.

Saturn, like Jupiter, is not directly inhabited. Saturn's moon Titan is a popular tourist destination, however. Its combination of low gravity and thick atmosphere mean that a fairly fit human can strap on wings and fly under their own power, one of the few places in the solar system that this is possible without assistance.

Saturn also plays host to the Saturn Solar Shipyards, a collaborative art project to design and produce as many accurate reproductions of fictional spacecraft as possible. If you are interested in leaving the solar system to boldly go, they organize extrasolar expeditions. Or if you merely want to play the part while staying within teleport range of your home, they also offer immersive wargames that pit the various spacecraft off against each other.

Some people, perhaps inspired by Equinoctial by John Varley, live in the rings of Saturn in personal habitats of various sizes. They bounce around trying to paint the rings different colors, but the hobby is sufficiently unpopular that the vast majority of the rings remain unpainted.

Uranus and Neptune play home to the twin cloud-cities of Salt and Pepper. These cities float through the upper atmospheres of their respective planets, never in the same place for long. Pepper plays at being a cyberpunk distopia, with dark rain-lashed streets, copious sex and drugs, and a thriving black market. Pepper is largely ruled by criminal syndicates, the nominal government existing only to handle interplanetary relations and provide just enough enforcement that avoiding it is fun.

Salt is a bright, colorful place, full of gardens and winding cobbled streets. Salt is where people from Pepper can go to relax, when living the life of a high-powered cat burglar or street runner has temporarily lost its charm. Many people commute back and forth between Salt and Pepper daily, their life of crime enhanced by having a safe bolthole to which to retreat.

Pluto is an eclectic place. So far from the sun that it begins to resemble only an unusually-bright star in an otherwise eternal night, Pluto hosts a mix of people wanting to 'prove' that it is a planet by establishing a successful colony, people who just want to travel as far from home as possible, and people striving to become eldritch beings from beyond.

There are no large cities, but there is a sprawling network of subsurface tunnels, secret lakes, and abandoned art pieces covering much of the surface.

Pluto's moon Charon has a similar story, although it also hosts the annual Secret Society Convention. Visitors to Charon are obliged to wear dark, concealing robes when out in public. Styx, the main settlement on Charon also provides a variety of conference rooms, chapels, sacrificial alters, and libraries of forbidden lore that are available for conspiracies, secret societies, and occult study groups to rent for reasonable rates.

Out beyond the Kuiper belt, Sedna is the last outpost of solar civilization before the great vast darkness of interstellar space. It is very sparsely populated, home primarily to the maintainers of the Shining Beacon, a symbolic watchtower that looks out into the darkness.

When the colonization efforts reach Alpha Centauri, and the first interstellar colonists look back towards their home system, it is Sedna that will return their gaze, maintaining their self-appointed vigil.