Universe Epsilion

Living among the ruins of the greatest empire that ever existed, surrounded by beings demonic and angelic. The crying towers of metropoli endless. The once pristine cityscapes reveal their cracks, the mindless drones who act without thought, they work as they had for millennia. I see all this from the gaping wound of a skyscraper.  

Making way, there is a path to greatness among this maze. A portal opens with a zap of energy, to worlds too distant to accurately fathom.   

Against beings from hell we managed to persevere, they do not intimidate or rule us.  We are seeking a civilization of humanity.  It exists out there, where? No one knows. In a galaxy so vast, a entire empire is impossible to find. 

We travel from gateway to gateway, travelling to worlds numerous. Every turn, it would seem that there's another danger awaiting for us. For however long, no one can truly know, since the end, this is how things have been.   

Assumptions 

There is a multitude of gateways to other worlds in this place.  They lead to other parts of the galaxy.  Their mechanics unknown; anomalies in space, displacement of two spaces, “special regions”.  It’s all sorts of physics in the name of trespassing reality itself.   

Outside of the special regions there’s the lux drives, utilized by many societies who have developed since the annihilation and our emancipation that came when the empire destroyed itself.  The state of humanity before than was non-existent.  Treatment of humans when the empire dominated being of complete shame.  Complete and total shame.   

Lux Drives and Special Regions require lux, which is had to really grasp.  One can ramble upon quantum displacements and hyperdimensional photons, but the nature of Lux Drives remains ultimately a confusion.  Manufacture of Lux Drives is done with very little knowledge of the mechanics.  They are a buildable black box since all you need are the particles from stars, which when contained can be excited with any sort of director to warp to other star systems. 

Hyperintelligent entities are for all intents and purposes, impossible.  There is no gods.  There are beings with the power of demigods, no doubt, but omnipotence of any kind is absent.  Or reality is just to young for such entities to develop yet, all these billions of years it took just to develop microbes.  How many billions would it take to create beings that manipulate reality itself?  Unknown.  There may be 4th dimensional beings, but no one can say /for certain/ on that matter. 

While there is extremely, extremely outlandish things, there’s no true “magical” forces sans the exception of ‘lux’ and its limited applications in the two main FTL systems.  THIS IS NEVER TO BE VIOLATED. 

The internal consistency principle is strongly enforced; violations of it causing any such entities to collapse into component parts (read: DIE) 

When it comes to biology, there’s a lot of overlap in what is and isn’t edible thanks to DNA being shockingly similar across many separate origins.  The effects can be rather hard to predict, and there is a gradient in this whole DNA thing with a several notable, and rather obvious cut-offs.  Such as how beings from radically different chemistries tend to be poisonous to each other to the point where they can hardly inhabit the same space without protection.  Operiunn for instance require freezing conditions and have ultrawhite (and extremely reflective) exosuits to jeep internally cold.   

History Lessons 

On the fate of Earth and the Solar System: 

The fate of earth is extremely grim.  It’s been thousands of years since the slave raids and its unknown how humanity on Earth fell, as it could be the product of our own folly or from alien invasion.  The end result remains the same; that being, humans ended up sent thousands of light years from earth by Vamusk slave raiders and Earth being barely habitable for most higher order life (the bugs have reclaimed earth and forests are scant, just vast deserts, grasslands and steppes- few megafauna still prosper, notably horses.  Some neotribal groups of humans still stalk around earth’s surface.) and rifle in bunker-like city complexes still eroding from millennia ago, their history unknown and the truth buried in lies.  Sol as a system in current time, the year 1000 PA (Post Annihilation) is occupied by alien beings unaffiliated with the slave raiders or us who colonized Europa and Xenoformed it, along with a several other icy moons.  Human activity in sol is very little, only a lonely outpost with minimal defenses (the aliens just have no interest in Earth) from the cooperative around Earth that does occasional surveys and attempts to look into the past of earth- many ancient artifacts having already been looted from Earth in the past centuries to be circulated in Cooperative museums.   

On Current Humanity: 

The psyche of humans by 1000 PA is extremely complicated.  Humans, all of which today descended from those breed from slavers and circulated around the Empire in its twilight years were developmentally stunted /until recently/.  Millennia spent living as rats, insignificant to the grand picture of galactic society and used in experiments done by the Vamusk due to how similar we are to them biologically (The Vamusk morphologically are comparable to arboreal bipeds, meaning they have MANY traits in common with us (but still very different) despite some psychological and major cultural differences).  Humans also ended up being allowed to live lives and were able to gain knowledge, learn and so on- in a empire so vast, the situation for humans on countless worlds is similiarly complex.  As you get humans who were kept primitive, sometimes engineered out of what sapience they had.  Other times you get disgusting uses of humans, being viewed as rapidly reproducing and expendable.  Yet human populations in the empire as a whole by the time of annihilation were in the billions, and the Cooperative itself was formed by renegade human slaves jumping into the stellar abyss for a new beginning, a minor problem compared to the vast drama unfolding in the Empire at the time.  Other human societies scurried into the shadows as the last war and annihilation happened, hidden as the empire fell apart.  Those humans would go on to emerge in a uphill ascent, competing across time and space against alien threats innumerable.  Others would go on to found world-states in the depths of space, others still developed to making powerful factions of their own- the Assembly being the most notable of said factions. 

The Cooperative is a comparatively young society that developed only 350 years ago, rapidly advancing and in competition with the Metasyndicate. 

On the state of Vamusk: 

The Vamusk are a force still, with factions like the mercantile and strangely diplomatic Last City who carries a powerful post imperial fleet and the Seventh Republic as a major regional power (that oppresses humans in their places in their own way).  It’s easy to see them as disgraced, but do not be fooled, Vamusk are still an extremely widespread and successful species.  Do not assume them of a homogenous nature.   

On The Ccrypcp: 

The Ccrypcp have multiple powerful, competing factions and have contended with their shameful past in their creation of the cancer.  The Ccrpcyp were uplifted by a colony of Qvkr and have since developed in the past 1500 years to be one of the more interesting of species. 

On The Rovii: 

A comparatively young species that suffered multiple existential conflicts.  And survived them all.  The Rovii in a span of 500 years have developed faster than anyone expected, at rates even the Cooperative struggles to keep up.  The Rovii are outside Imperial politics entirely, the Cooperative may induce a collective amnesia about their past as lab rats, but the Rovii are truly free from the influence of the ancients. 

On The Aveterriat: 

The Aveterriat are another species free of the Empire’s reach.  The Aveterriat have been around for a while, around 2100 years with the capability of space travel.  The Aveterriat only the past 700 years have been able to develop any advanced civilizations outside of their spread out and heavily armed world-states.   

Mysterious Things: 

The Vargynn are the most advanced beings known, but they didn’t come to control the galaxy despite their victories against the annihilators.  They are seen from time to time, motives unknown.  Some wonder if they predate the empire.  The Zatraii are other strange beings encountered out there believed to be pre-imperial in nature. 

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This is the one hellish plight.  On the backwater of the galaxy, misery is the norm.  I am someone who sees this misery everywhere I look; but Gerald seeks to deny it.  Every, right and wrong is lost to folly and menace.  This is our future, we are talking here.  And for millennia, despite having technology godlike to the ancients, suffering has only increased for most.  The ladder of civilization always has a bottom rung, but does it need to be this way?