Staarus Wiki

Werayne

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About
Author Katelyn Woods
Setting Various
Published 2025
Narrative Characteristics
POV First Person
Tense Past
Narrative Voices 2
Sophie
Abigail
Geography and Climate
Dominant Climate
SPOILERS
  • tropical
  • subtropical
Equatorial Temprature 88F
Polar Temprature 75F
Superscript Citation1
Subscript Name1
This is it. The big one. The stakes are higher than ever, with the entire universe at risk as the Weraynians force their way past the borders of their home world and begin to wage war. A team of the Staarus System's best assembles to try and stop the fighting once and for all. BOOK THREE IN THE STAARUS SYSTEM SERIES

Show Content
  • 1. Plot
  • 2. Trivia
  • 3. Navigation
  • 4. Citations

Plot

At Alliance Base 17, outside of the Staarus System, Sophie Lestari learns of the outbreak of the Weraynian war when a Weraynian is arrested in their sector of space. Organising aid and support for the Staarus System with her Alliance team, Sophie uses the teleport watch to travel to Flauraan but is intercepted along the way by Staarus HQ, where she is presented with the task of assembling a team of talented individuals the Staarus forces have been watching in order to undertake a secret mission.

Sophie collects Abigail and then the two travel to Halapatov to collect Alexa and Jayken - an Aandriggian with the power to see the future and a reformed Weraynian on the Staarus side, respectively. Meeting them is challenging for Abigail, who has been struggling with the morality of her people's war with the Weraynian and she is confronted by Alexa's hostility especially. Alexa and Jayken agree to join the team, though they don't feel like they have much choice in the matter, and Sophie transports them all to Staarus HQ, where the final member of their team - Rojjel, Halapatovian tech genius and anarchist - is waiting for them. Following screening, introductions and minimal information about their mission, the team begins their task of building and testing mysterious machines that are to be integrated into the existing network of space stations around Werayne; previously used to generate a force field that kept the Weraynians penned in.

Tensions run high between the team. Rojjel and Sophie are supposed to be working on machinery together but their differing personalities clash. Abigail and Sophie struggle with their feelings for each other in the midst of an ongoing war. Jayken maintains a cheery outlook but is under intense scrutiny by Staarus forces. Alexa is distrustful, especially towards Abigail who has expressed strong anti-Weraynian sentiment, and she worries about the best way to protect Jayken, especially since she has been having visions of him being tortured. While the rest of the team is on a mission without them, Alexa is forced to confide in Abigail the nature of her visions and the stress it has been causing her, and the two form an uneasy alliance, with Alexa growing more trusting of Abigail as she demonstrates an ability to change while questioning the propoganda of her upbringing.

Sophie's old colleagues from the Alliance turn up to the Staarus System to provide assistance, just before the majority of Weraynian forces destroy the blockade surrounding Werayne. Sophie and Abigail are forced to confront the rising tension between them. The team calms down a little and then on an aid mission to the refugee settlement Aandrigo, on one of Halapatov's moons, an alien vigilante known as the Protector seeks them out and urges them to change sides in the war. The team faces difficulty in their attempts to defect and Sophie and Abigail are haunted by their past adventures as they figure out the dark secret behind their mission and work to fix things.

Trivia

  • Werayne had a complicated journey and changed a lot from its conception in 2013 to its final published state in 2025. It was originally planned to be the final of a larger series books - Flauraan, Halapatov, Aandrigo, Staphas, Mullthytude and then Werayne - and feature the protagonists from each book as members of the team on a secret mission to end the war or some other feature becoming relevant; some features of which made it into the final story. The original plan was for the novel to switch between the perspectives of all the team members, and in the final version the perspective switch is only between Sophie and Abigail.

    • - Flauraan and Halapatov remained very similar to their planned versions.

    - Aandrigo was going to be a novel set on the planet Halapatov with its protagonist being an Aandriggian immigrant from the planet Aandrigo. It would portray a love story between the Aandriggian - Alexa - and a new Aandriggian boy, Jayken, in her class who would later be revealed to be a Weraynian. She would be the only one who knew his secret and Jayken would end up betraying a Weraynian plot with Alexa out of love for her. It would also have been written by a different author to any of the published authors of Staarus novels. Elements of this novel would be incorporated into Werayne; Alexa and Jayken would become surrogate siblings instead of lovers, Jayken would become less morally gray and have arrived on Halapatov by accident, and Alexa would help take down a Weraynian plot due to visions of the future. They would continue to be members of the secret team in Werayne alongside Sophie and Abigail. The story of Jayken and Alexa's meeting would eventually be told in the short story The Incursion .

    - The Mullthytudians were to have different powers based on hair colour, and the protagonist would be named Trista, a young woman with long silver hair forced to step up as a leader in the face of some conflict between the different groups of people on her planet. She would then be referenced in Werayne as the member of the team that Sophie took the place of - Sophie being an unexpected arrival - who was working elsewhere in the war. The name Trista would be given to the Halapatovian pilot assigned to the Staarus team in the final version of Werayne .

    - Staphas was one of the least developed novel ideas of the lot, and would feature a rogue Staphan, depicted as an angel like alien with wings, being hunted by a team from other planets across a mountain range somewhere on the planet. The Halapatovian member of the secret team in Werayne would have originated in this novel, as the novel Halapatov instead featured Sophie and Abigail as protagonists

    - Staphas, Aandrigo and Mullthytude were planets out of the 17 planets in the original Staarus System. Other planets originally planned included Molosis, Gyanosis, Ranigrous, Belatadiakorisafosaea and Forcellius, some of them populated and others unpopulated. In the end, the Staarus System would consist of three populated planets - Flauraan, Halapatov and Werayne - mirroring the three books. Aandrigo became a Halapatovian moon where refugees from Werayne were resettled. Mullthytude became the name of an island on Halapatov. 1 Staphas would be reused as the name of the planet Alliance Base 17 orbited. Ranigrous would become Alliance member Mickey's home planet and be far from the Staarus System. 2 Belatadiakorisafosaea became the name of a one off character in The School Camp Experience. Molosis was originally envisioned as a planet with many moons, and in Werayne Sophie describes a past incident where her team was involved in tracking down a stolen Molodian moon as an Easter egg reference to the original planet.3 Forcellius was envisioned as a planet surrounded by a naturally generated force field, with its inhabitants having related powers; this idea would be recycled with the emphasis on the force field around Werayne and the Halapatovians and Paladanians having expertise with force fields/shields. Gyanosis remains a planet in the Staarus System, but is unpopulated and not relevant to any of the novels as current.

  • In addition to the plethora of Staarus novels, there was to be an Alliance novel from the perspective of (human) Mickey Raefello as a member of the Alliance - a secret/military organisation instead of the aid organisation of the final stories. It would depict his journey joining a new Alliance team after working as a medic in a hospital, meeting Sophie as well as their team leader Robyn (also human), befriending (human) Steve, an Alliance pilot, and their work in a variety of action packed missions including a hoverbike chase with (fully human and a woman) Beth as they joined with her team to provide security at a government event (invited by Beth due to her friendship with Sophie), Mickey learning to take risks and be more confident by successfully infiltrating an escaping spacecraft to save children being trafficked, and culminating in Mickey using his people skills to talk down a man who'd hijacked a space station containing dangerous scientific objects including some sort of time travel device, in order to save his family from deaths he caused. This story would also feature a romance between Sophie and Mickey, with the two beginning to date at the end of the novel, and continue dating in the original concept of Werayne. Mickey played an essential role in the climax of Werayne originally. The vaguest elements of the Alliance novel were carried over to the Staarus canon, with the character concepts being changed into alien versions with similar personalities, the Alliance becoming an intergalactic, diverse aid agency with very few humans employed, and Mickey and Sophie instead being best friends/queerplatonic partners, and stronger bonds established between all five members of the team. The story that is closest to evoking the original concept is First Contact
  • There were three other tie in novels planned for the Staarus series: a novel depicting the Protector getting his/her powers and liberating his/her home planet from a tyrranical government that sold its people into slavery (originally the Protector was envisioned as a man but changed to be a woman later), Terrified - depicting the life of Paladanian Weraynian hybrid Terra, who was captured from Flauraan alongside other Paladanian children during a Weraynian Scare, merged with Weraynian DNA to become a super soldier type being and then lost in the subsequent rescue mission and drifted through space in an escape pod for twenty years before landing on a human colony outside the Staarus System and being adopted by an unassuming couple. Terra becomes a wanted fugitive as an adult due to her superhuman strength and augmentation, and her and a friend race across the galaxy seeking safety, and find it in the climax, only for Terra to be found by a Weraynian scout ship and taken to Werayne to fight in the war - and Scared in which Terra fights on the side of Weraynians, being controlled/swayed by brainwashing. She battles the Protector and is defeated by her, and switches sides to fight for the Staarus forces. She is later recaptured by the Weraynians and meets Sophie Lestari, not knowing the significance of the meeting, before being rescued and reunited with the Protector. The scene where she meets Sophie was written, and is available to read here and was to have a corresponding scene in Werayne but much of this storyline was altered before it could be written. Terra and the Protector exist in the final version of Werayne but play much smaller roles than originally planned. A brief description of their story is given by Mickey in the final version of Werayne.4
  • The original version of Werayne was to be more morally obscure, with the Weraynians being truly evil but only due to experiments they had done on themselves in response to cruelty from Halapatov and Flauraan. Jayken was altered by the process that took him to Halapatov and became no longer evil as a result. Through Lexie's visions, Abigail would discover that Werayne was placed into the force field by Staarus forces during the original war not as a last resort but due to wanting to control the Weraynians and viewing them as 'animals' unworthy of empathy due to their lack of powers and similar progress to Halapatov and Flauraan. The team would discover that the force field's were affecting Weraynian brains (much like in the final novel) and Abigail and Sophie would use the machine built from their ship to hijack the signal and use it to unbrainwash all Weraynians, resulting in them becoming peaceful and good. This take on Weraynian's, while naive, was an attempt by the teenaged author at exploring a classic science fiction trope, the homogenous planet, in which the entire population of a planet acts a certain way (usually being evil). Werayne, as originally depicted, was entirely homogenously evil due to cruelty, exploitation and experimentation, created villains by the uncaring inhabitants of their neighbouring planets. The author, reflecting on their teenage creation as an adult, found the original concept to be a bit too white savioury for their taste, and altered the story to be more about community organising, empathy and unlearning propoganda, reflecting in many ways their own experience with a simpler, black and white morality as a child and then growing up and learning how much more complicated and morally grey many political situations are. The author also regrets their teenaged belief that they could depict a war, being a sheltered person living in the Western world with no direct experience with war. Nonetheless, they decided to maintain the war as the setting of the novel but change the characters from witnessing frontline warfare to a more removed role. The final novel bears many similarities to its original concept.
  • Changes were also made to the brutality of the novel. The original concepts toyed with various deaths which all ended up being cut from the final novel. Sophie was originally to die in the war, reflecting the author's teenage struggle with depression and slight martyr complex, mixed with an inability to imagine their life beyond their teenage years. The original scene would have involved the teleport watch being destroyed and Sophie being killed in the subsequent explosion, crushed by rubble. This idea was changed to Sophie simply losing her arm in the same scene when the author decided their character deserved to survive. In the final version of the novel, Sophie's arm is damaged in an unrelated blast and she is given a prosthetic arm, with the teleport watch also surviving and becoming Abigail's possession instead. Another late change to the story was the survival of Beth, who was planned to die the moment their character was conceived, and their death scene was one of the first scenes written for Werayne. A similar scene appears in the final novel in which Beth gets injured and ends up disabled due to an alien organ of theirs rupturing, and the character requiring specific technology and medication to stay grounded in the present/their physical body. The author, unfamiliar with the grief of losing a loved one but very familiar with the experience of disability, mental health struggles and caring for others with disabilities, changed these elements to reflect this. Also, Abigail was to learn late into the novel that her father had died, and be forced to cope with the news. In the final version of Werayne no named characters die, though other traumatising things occur to the protagonists.
  • Originally when Sophie was captured by Weraynians following Beth's death/injury, she was taken to a facility where prisoners were strapped into containers and tortured/used as batteries, vaguely reminiscent of the Matrix. Sophie would be freed by the Protector when she/he took down the facility to save Terra, and stay behind to hold off the remaining Weraynians while the rest of the prisoners escaped.
  • More bonus content regarding Werayne's changes over time available here
    • Navigation

    Novels

    • Flauraan • Halapatov • Werayne • Do I Dare Disturb the Universe? • SOTTOS • Others

    Main Cast

    • Sophie • Abigail • Riowyn • Aldred • Mickey • Beth • Steve • Robyn • Alexa • Jayken • Rojjel

    By Species

    • Humans • Paladanians • Halapatovians • Pecayens • Other Aliens

    Citations

    1. Halapatov Chapter 6
    2. Grouscycle Blues
    3. Werayne Chapter 2
    4. Werayne Chapter 11