BEYOND INFINITY
Five Galactic Cycles had passed since the end of the Galactic Conflict that had lasted 2,800 years. Entire systems were decimated, and scientific progress pushed back tens of thousands of years. What remained in the ashes of the conflict began rebuilding; primitive beings who barely knew how to light fires, surrounded by the wrecks of hundreds of warships and the bodies of millions of unknown species. Some worshipped these items, while others wanted to unlock the potential of these technologies that had been long-forgotten. Derelict space-faring vessels floated in space, forming artificial asteroid fields around planets. Many ancient historians looked up into the skies and documented floating chunks of metal "above the clouds", occasionally raining down on the people below who still didn't have a clue what they were or why they were there in the first place.
Thousands of years passed, and what civilisations had grown and prospered in the wake of the Galactic Conflict began to scavenge the orbiting spacecraft. It took hundreds of more years for these technologies to be implemented into their own designs, but the result was a jump-start of almost a thousand years of science and medicine. What was found in these ships proved invaluable, and as these new civilisations probed the stars, they found ancient ruins. Again, many worshipped these ruins, treating them as shrines to their overlords. Others harvested what was found and sold them for a fortune. But what was common among all these ruins was a single light that blinked once every minute. No one knew what it meant, and no one could find a way to stop it. Every light on every ruin blinked in synchrony.
Now the first kindlings of space travel had been set, and hundreds of civilisations built numerous starships and off-world colonies. Faster-than-light travel, although still in its infancy, had been instrumental in allowing ships to traverse great distances in small spans of time. It would only be a matter of time before these civilisations would come across one another.
CIVILISATIONS
- The Unitary Galactic Republic
- The Confederation of Shield Systems
- The Galactic Kami Empire