Post by Wysp on Oct 11, 2015 21:02:57 GMT -5
Lore
"Sit down, child. You are impetuous, and you ask questions that a child your age should not think to. But you are inquisitive. So I will answer your question, even if it may spawn many more.
"We were not born on this world. Did you ever wonder why our crops will not grow unless we spread the flesh of death into the earth? This is not a world of men.
"Look up, child. Do you see the stars? They are not just pinpricks in night’s curtain, but great balls of fire, as brilliant as the suns in summer, very far away, so far we could never reach them were we to ride a snake for twenty lifetimes. Look at that one, in the cross between the moons. The dim one, close to the top. That is where we came from. Once mankind rode across the sky on wings that carried us faster than light’s rays, to any star we might wish. But then came the virus.
"The virus was a sickness, a sickness in the hearts of men and the tools they made. But it festered, and it grew. Men thought they knew all there was to know, and they built tools that were as men. But the gods became jealous, for creating life was their domain. The virus spread, and none knew how to combat that before it struck. When it did, it struck down every tool, every wing that carried us from star to star. And here we landed, on this world. This is our punishment for building those tools, and now we live as we should, with naught but fire and and the bow as our companions. And that is how it should be."
"We were not born on this world. Did you ever wonder why our crops will not grow unless we spread the flesh of death into the earth? This is not a world of men.
"Look up, child. Do you see the stars? They are not just pinpricks in night’s curtain, but great balls of fire, as brilliant as the suns in summer, very far away, so far we could never reach them were we to ride a snake for twenty lifetimes. Look at that one, in the cross between the moons. The dim one, close to the top. That is where we came from. Once mankind rode across the sky on wings that carried us faster than light’s rays, to any star we might wish. But then came the virus.
"The virus was a sickness, a sickness in the hearts of men and the tools they made. But it festered, and it grew. Men thought they knew all there was to know, and they built tools that were as men. But the gods became jealous, for creating life was their domain. The virus spread, and none knew how to combat that before it struck. When it did, it struck down every tool, every wing that carried us from star to star. And here we landed, on this world. This is our punishment for building those tools, and now we live as we should, with naught but fire and and the bow as our companions. And that is how it should be."
The Story So Far
Many millennia ago, the Orion Empire rose from an obscure star to spread across the galaxy. They build vast seedships to carry their children across the stars and to found new colonies countless lightyears distant. As their reach grew, so did their knowledge and power. Such was their strength that they could move entire stars and drill through time and space to shorten the distances they travelled, and so they built the Gates. Massive constructs a thousand kilometers in diameter, the Gates were capable of forming wormholes to transport ships across lightyears in the span of a month. At the apex of the Empire's glory, it was said that all the riches of the galaxy could be found in the court of the Emperor, a massive palace called Olympus Mons. It was said that in Olympus Mons, the impossible was commonplace and men walked as gods in the Emperor's court. The Olympians ruled vast sectors of the galaxy, and above them all ruled the Emperor himself, the closest man to true divinity.
But their happiness was not to last.
For every gleaming star there is a black shadow, and the Empire's shadow is known only as the Virus. The legends and myths do not remember whence the Virus arose, nor what manner of infection it was. All that is known is that is crept silently into every system, every factory, every Gate, and in the blink of an eye, the entire Empire died. Ships floated dead in space, their life support cut off and their crew slaughtered. Orbital factories fell from the sky and the Gate system simply shut down. Colonies across the stars were isolated from the Empire, and the survivors did all they could to eke out a living in the wreckage.
Then, centuries later, the early Empire's seed-ships arrived at their destinations. When they got there, the onboard computers found the barbaric remnants of the Empire's colonies, the best of them now reduced to barely space-capable. These treasure troves from the skies enraptured the colonies, and soon the seed-ships were reverse-engineered and the once-colonies took to the skies. And now, one by one, the Gates awaken...