The leeward side of the Thunder hills form the typhoon season home for the Plains folk.

Spending a season in the Thunder hills is an awe inspiring and shattering experience. Earth quakes are common, and earth tremors are near continuous. The glaciers, eruptions and lava flows of the volcano's of the Flame peaks are clearly and luridly visible except when obscured by a typhoon. The wind force, torrential rains and flash floods of the many typhoons are extremely dangerous. The Firehose river is in peak flood at that season adds a continual grinding roar. The Firehose, complete with 30 meter high waves (in a river!) is clearly visible from the shelters of the Plains folk.

It is little wonder then that the Plains folk are by far the toughest and weirdest of the inhabitants of the Planet.

The Transporter `flu, in addition to its own genetic encoding, collects and transmits a random selection of genetic frameworks from its previous host to its new victim.

Thus in addition to suffering `flu like symptoms due to the reproduction of Transporter `flu virii, the victim is gifted with an influx of strange new genetic material.

Whilst the existence of such an pathogen seems bizarre and unlikely in the extreme, it can perhaps be understood in terms of its survival merits.

When some organism is stressed, and the fluctuations of the Firehose provides a continuous source of environmental stress, it becomes susceptible to the Transporter `flu.

Stress basically means that the organism isn't quite coping with its current environment.

The Transporter `flu then gifts the organism with a random parcel of genetic material. Although very unlikely, occasionally one of these genetic gifts provides the organism with the solution to the problems it is currently facing. In this case the organism survives, propagates itself and spreads the Transporter 'flu.

This mechanism implies that evolution on the Planet is orders of magnitude faster than on old Earth. Furthermore there is no sexually based species divergence. ie. Subspecies do not have time to evolve into distinct and distinctive groups before the next step of evolution occurs.

Thus on the Planet there are no distinct species, only a continuous spectrum of slightly differing organisms.