Deadly Beautiful was a planet in the Orion Quadrant located roughly between Parallax colony and Earth. Deadly Beautiful was visited by the Fleet of Orion in the Solar Year 7483 following their retreat from the parallax system. [Worlds Apart Book 11: Charlemagne]
Deadly beautiful was a water giant planet with a liquid surface. The crew named it Deadly Beautiful because the planet present from space as an incredibly colorful and beautifully polished sphere. Light from the sun created iridescent patterns in the planet’s thick, hot atmosphere. The atmosphere was also filled with lightning spikes that looked sort of like one of those electric plasma globes.
The combination of high surface temperature (at least 300 degrees standard) and the dense toxic atmosphere precluded any exploration of the planet. So, the crews of the ships admired it from a distance.
Unknown to the crew, the toxic stew of steaming hydrocarbons that made up the planet's surface was home to an array of indigenous life forms whose physiologies would not fit into any known classification system, but which were, nevertheless, living and even had evolved their own limited degree of intelligence and primitive culture. The spikes of lightning were this culture’s entertainment media, and consisted primarily of situation comedies in which a polymer does something terribly misguided, subsequently learns his lesson, but the immediately reverts to his normal buffoonish character by the start of the next episode.