The planet is idyllic and natural, green and gold. The land is striped with ancient verdant forests in the north, in the south a thin rib of mountainous jungle and a white desert along the equator, and in between the two extremes, flat gossamer plains and huge blue skies. They blend and fuzz together though, mingle and touch and trade secrets between latitudes. The red rocks of the north crumble into red clay beneath the northern plains. The small desert lizards that scamper in tiny herds have cousins in the rain forest at the feet of the mountains. The starlings care not what clime they are born in. And the people show evidence of traveling the spectrum as well. They are the greatest example on the planet of the interconnectedness of all living things, of each biome and each tiny microhabitat. They are a symbol to themselves of the cycles of balance and renewal.
In the north the people are common and cheerful, colorful, and varied as the talkative birds in the trees. They congregate on the branches of the river like bird in trees too. Clusters of smoky villages crowd the waterfront and the starlings try to steal the seeds from their small sown fields. They have eyes of brown, blue, green, black, and anything in between. Their hair is short, long, curly, straight, thick, wispy, brown, black, gold, red, or gray. They grow mostly stocky, the cold winters favoring more massive bodies, but not always. They have rounded features in general, soft, yielding faces given to smiles from ear to teacup handle auricle below brows arched in laughter.
As one travels southward, the people, though still numerous and buoyant, begin to change. With warmer weather their frames grow leaner, their hair thinner. As you approach the plains you start to see less of the round face and gentle features. They start to look sharper, though far from severe. With all that open space it seems people don't feel the need to congregate as closely. When there are no trees or mountains to keep you out of eye contact with your neighbor, there is less need to live in each other's back yards perhaps. They may wave to each other from the edges of their wide grain fields, but they aren't in shouting distance, so often say nothing at all. They are quieter people living in small communities of a family or two sharing a farm or mill, but when visiting in the north to sell their grain, there is nothing stopping them from nattering in the trees with their starling cousins nor dancing before the fire with shrieks of laughter ringing into a frosty canopy.
The plains people epitomize the perfect blending of all the people on the planet Not only do they laugh and dance around fires and shoo birds from their fields, but their faces are impish and their statures predictably average. They live to see old age much more frequently than northerners, the winters being less harsh here than there, and their straight hair blankets their heads and shoulders and can conceal, if they wish, the subtle phylliform of their ears. When the northerners travel south to visit friends, family, and to sell their orchard vegetables and beer, it brings a smile of wonder to their faces to spot the first dainty point. Children stare brazenly, but the plains people are generally happy to smile back at them knowingly, remembering the first time they saw a northerner.
It is as you escape the plains further south and pass into rugged hot forests and finally vine and snake covered mountains that the scattered people you see begin to look like no relation at all to the Northern people. Though the plains people be their children and ancestors, they all know they are one family, it is just difficult to tell by looking. The hair begins to turn dark with few exceptions, brows fierce and pointed, eyes bright and stormy at the same time, intelligent, but hard. People are taller here than anywhere else in the world. Despite they way they look, and despite the way they look at you, with cold appraisal, they are not fearsome people. Fighting is not something they are accustomed to, and anyone who has ever found themselves at their mercy in their lands of stinging insects and hungry predators knows that mercy is a way of life for them. They would not survive if they did not help each other, or even strangers when they happen upon them. The worst you must fear from them is a cold shoulder or a look of non-comprehension or indifference when you speak.
Finally, in the desert, the antithesis to our jolly northern drunkards can be found. These tall, lean people live to see more than two centuries it is said. They do not drink alcohol. No northerner has ever wanted to give it up if it meant they could see an extra hundred years, however, and nor do they think it would work anyway. The desert people live in pristine cities that seem to float like enormous sea-vessels on the sand, never sinking below it, difficult to find as if they actually did move at the whim of the desert wind. They use no animals to carry them across the barren dunes or carve dry channels into the cracked earth for irrigation. They too live in peace as a matter of course, and trade salt for fruit with their relatives in the mountains, bowing respectfully to them and leaving with a gesture of blessing and the words 'dup dor a'az mubstel'. They spend much of their lives in study and meditation. The libraries and temples within their mysterious limestone cities are the best in the world, and they share them with anyone willing to cross the desert to read. It is in these people that you see the other half of the origins of the plains people typified clearly. Their quiet natures, their lean, untiring muscles. The arrowhead point to their ears.