I've heard it said that the map of the multiverse can be read from the curls of steam that rise from a good cup of tea. So connected is everything that even the smallest wisps grant opportunities to peek into grand designs.

Truth or hyperbole as that may be, reading the steam is an essential function of navigation on this planet I've touched down upon. Its surface is quite hostile; dangerously sharp obsidian juts out to form a jagged surface, and safe passage is only found through the huge network of tunnels carved out of former volcanic channels. The only way to determine which is correct is by carefully comparing the variations in densities of steam that pour from each to form the fog that hugs the surface; where it is thickest, there it is safest.

It would also be doing wonders for my skin if it were not several thousand degrees hotter than boiling point. I suppose I'll take what advantages I do get!

I feel like I'm barging in on something here!

I've been minding my business flying on my way to another gig, enjoying a particularly wonderful panorama of a star setting behind a nebula to my side, when in the distance in front of me I catch movement. Upon a closer glance, I realize I'm not alone flying around tonight!

The lazy curves and swirls of movement from the ship ahead of me are almost intimate, and as the ship journeys lazily toward the star, the pink light sets its body aglow. Two heads are visible in the front viewport, close together, cheek to cheek.

Love may be in the canned air over there! I can practically see little hearts radiating off behind them in the thrusters' tail beam. There may not be a more beautiful or more appropriate sight to fly towards!

I wish them well, whatever their journey brings. I'll hang back a bit to let them have their moment.

It's been a trawl to get this world mapped, that's for sure.

There isn't much to see. I'm hundreds of kilometers deep in some kind of plasma or liquid, scanning the landscapes still yet much further below. I had a close call with a particularly huge mountain a few hours ago, but otherwise most of the interest has come from this strange matter. Storms of some sort seem to develop, rampage through, and disappear all in a matter of seconds. It tosses me around a bit, but other than that and some bright green lightning flashes, it's pretty uneventful.

It's on gigs like these that I truly appreciate my ship though. It's a marvel of engineering, effortlessly handling the rapidly-shifting atmospheres as if it were flying through nothing at all. But it's been through some challenging environments before, thick and thin; I know when it's getting pushed too hard.

That's why I get the privilege, if sometimes a bit tedious of one, to do my work safely in this rig.

I'm sure I'll be back to seeing prettier worlds soon!

They ran out of cloud storage. So they built more clouds.

The surface of this world is not very pleasant for basically any kind of life. Many centuries ago the people here developed ways to form clouds that were solid enough to build on, but yet still floated just as lightly in the air.

As they refined the technology further they built massive factories to produce more of the airborne surfaces. There was so much growth that they began to stack the puffy landscapes on top of each other for more space. Now it is just as much a vertical endeavor as a horizontal one to travel on this planet.

Not only is it survivable up there, it's quite pleasant! The sunrises are particularly a thing to behold. The rays progressively saturate the layers, bringing a warm glow to the environment with a beautiful gradient into the horizon from all the mist.

The factories are fascinating in their own right as well. You can actually be in them when they're activated. It's a textured air that forms and flows all around you, pushing you gently around the massive chambers. Not a traditional spa treatment, but wonderfully relaxing all the same!

This is a whole new world…but I've been here before?

It defies explanation. This is the correct planet; there's nothing even remotely close that I could be mistaking for it. However, it's unlike I've ever seen it. The continents that sectioned the sphere in their abstract shapes are no longer; instead there are brand new ones, and many more than before. This isn't continental drift; this happened over a matter of a couple of days. It's as if the jigsaw puzzle of the landscapes were rearranged to form a whole new figure.

I was sent on this gig because anomalies were being detected on this normally highly monitored galactic area. Things were not adding up, and at some point it's like the planet had been entirely replaced. Now I can see why that seemingly nonsensical conclusion had been made!

Whatever happened here, it has rendered the maps of the world completely inaccurate and useless. It's unmapped itself somehow, as if it were trying to hide itself or cover its tracks. That especially problematic considering those maps are essential to safely navigate on the surface.

It seems my explorative nature is going to prove especially useful soon.

They outnumber the stars in the sky. And just as beautiful in their own way!

You may have had the pleasure of experiencing bugs that glow. This tiny out-of-the-way world is chock full of them. In fact, they're the only animal life on this sphere, at least when they aren't entertaining company such as myself.

It truly is remarkable to gaze upon them, from descent down to the surface to laying in the grass gazing up at them. To watch them is to watch the starry sky flutter and buzz about. Their lackadaisical patterns lull me to a peace I've been needing lately.

So unimaginably vast is the web of the multiverse. And yet, there's always room for more!

And that's exactly the focus of those madly scurrying about in this laboratory tonight. They're at the forefront of a rapidly evolving innovation: world seeds.

Artificially-formed planets have existed now for a long time. Many such ones dot the night sky in this wing of the galaxy itself. But these people seek to not only take a lot of manufacturing out of the process and have the whole thing come about in gentler, more natural methods, but also to do it at ten times the speed!

The seeds start out impossibly small; you could comfortably hold them in your hands. [Proxy note: as small as a bowling ball.] They're designed to attract and gather the exact ingredients needed to form the types of worlds they want to build, from terrestrial spheres to gas giants. Once built, they strategically chuck them out to space and the seeds handle the rest! In no time they form asteroids and moons, scaling up to planetoids, dwarf planets, and up and up beyond that.

They hope someday to be able to generate stars this way, but I'm told they're a long, long way off from that yet. Still, it is undoubtedly an amazing achievement to have come even this far! I look forward to stepping on the first prototype seed-generated world.

For now though, I merely observe their frantic work, weaving through uncountable amounts of instruments and devices providing every kind of function to progress ever forward. Their little ecosystem in this gigantic room is a complex but wonderful world.

Calamity. Then healing.

This world had to learn resilience living around its siblings. They're greedy, and they try to take from the planet's mass with each pass that swings just a little too close. But it has adapted. Its incredibly skilled denizens have built colossal infrastructure to give it a superpower.

Self-repair.

Even as I gaze upon it tonight, tracing the jagged lines of a tear in the edge of the world, swarms upon swarms of drone ships buzz around it, bringing in mass harvested from the planets that stole from it to rebuild itself stronger than ever. In only a matter of a week or two it will be completely unblemished once again, all while the population peacefully continues their existence far, far below the surface.

That is, until another close call. Then it all begins once again.