Primitive Polygon
🎖️ Game Master
Spring YE 38
The Null and Void System
~♫Blank Banshee - Cyber Slums♫~
The deck plates of the conveyor shuttle creaked and scraped, protesting against the pressure anomalies that wafted against the small vessel like the waves of some invisible, ethereal ocean. The moon of Nil was only a short burst from the planet below, but the gravitational lensing was so strong outside that no matter which porthole the occupants might look from, it looked like they were suspended half way down an infinitely deep whirlpool of warped golden matter.
There are some that might call a black hole the grave of a star, and others that might call it transcendence. Null and Void were two fraternal planets that orbited the crushing mass of once such abyss, so perhaps it was natural that they too embodied opposing concepts.
Void was a dead husk, caught just within the space-time warping effects of their parent body, making it lifeless and impossible to navigate. It is said that the original motherships of the Freespacer exodus laid to rest there, from a time in which the original Art of Never Again was still being written, long before the advent of their Yamatai nemesis.
Null was one of the centers of the more recent refugee crisis, and on top of that, the site within which the inertialess drive and the ley line systems had been developed during the Independent Worlds League’s brightest days… But skirting on the event horizon of a black hole was never going to be a great place to raise children, and those glory days were now also a thing that had been and gone.
Perhaps it was best said that the system continued to serve best only as a crossroads, such was the extent that the Freespacers made any sort of ‘home’ for themselves. To the galactic south was the belligerent Imperium of Nepleslian, and to the north, nothing but the Blue Rift, and the ever-sprawling untamed wild.
As Nil’s burgeoning crater starports grew closer, it’s grey ashen surface seemed to slowly crawl and flow with the bustle of thousands of tiny automata cargo service and mining robots. Most of the actual habitation sections were deep below, but somehow the faithful little tanks were already making it feel quite alive.
The shuttle landed at the base of a massive sprawling tower, holding dozens of colorful freespacer vessels aloft via an array of titanic docking arms, making the entire strange arrangement look somewhat like a archaic festival tree or a bizarre children’s toy. As awkward as an arrangement as it looked, many of such nomadic vessels were simply not designed to land on a solid surface.
Automated luggage tracks lead from the landing pads into a large and extremely thick transparent lead-zirconate dome at the base of the huge building, illuminated internally with a friendly green radioactive glow. The inside of port 1106 was an old hangout for thrill seekers, evidently, still home to a modicum of food and entertainment stalls despite some of the arrangements now looking a little dilapidated.
One of the VR-hub tables in the local food distribution court had been booked out by the syntelligence Soulnomad Jack-o-Lantern, in hope of some new crew members actually responding to his polysentience requests. The exact location was described in the invitation message.
Only time would tell what personalities would drive this new adventure, however, and what new corners of the vast rolling expanse they might end up in from these historic crossroads.
The Null and Void System
~♫Blank Banshee - Cyber Slums♫~
The deck plates of the conveyor shuttle creaked and scraped, protesting against the pressure anomalies that wafted against the small vessel like the waves of some invisible, ethereal ocean. The moon of Nil was only a short burst from the planet below, but the gravitational lensing was so strong outside that no matter which porthole the occupants might look from, it looked like they were suspended half way down an infinitely deep whirlpool of warped golden matter.
There are some that might call a black hole the grave of a star, and others that might call it transcendence. Null and Void were two fraternal planets that orbited the crushing mass of once such abyss, so perhaps it was natural that they too embodied opposing concepts.
Void was a dead husk, caught just within the space-time warping effects of their parent body, making it lifeless and impossible to navigate. It is said that the original motherships of the Freespacer exodus laid to rest there, from a time in which the original Art of Never Again was still being written, long before the advent of their Yamatai nemesis.
Null was one of the centers of the more recent refugee crisis, and on top of that, the site within which the inertialess drive and the ley line systems had been developed during the Independent Worlds League’s brightest days… But skirting on the event horizon of a black hole was never going to be a great place to raise children, and those glory days were now also a thing that had been and gone.
Perhaps it was best said that the system continued to serve best only as a crossroads, such was the extent that the Freespacers made any sort of ‘home’ for themselves. To the galactic south was the belligerent Imperium of Nepleslian, and to the north, nothing but the Blue Rift, and the ever-sprawling untamed wild.
As Nil’s burgeoning crater starports grew closer, it’s grey ashen surface seemed to slowly crawl and flow with the bustle of thousands of tiny automata cargo service and mining robots. Most of the actual habitation sections were deep below, but somehow the faithful little tanks were already making it feel quite alive.
The shuttle landed at the base of a massive sprawling tower, holding dozens of colorful freespacer vessels aloft via an array of titanic docking arms, making the entire strange arrangement look somewhat like a archaic festival tree or a bizarre children’s toy. As awkward as an arrangement as it looked, many of such nomadic vessels were simply not designed to land on a solid surface.
Automated luggage tracks lead from the landing pads into a large and extremely thick transparent lead-zirconate dome at the base of the huge building, illuminated internally with a friendly green radioactive glow. The inside of port 1106 was an old hangout for thrill seekers, evidently, still home to a modicum of food and entertainment stalls despite some of the arrangements now looking a little dilapidated.
One of the VR-hub tables in the local food distribution court had been booked out by the syntelligence Soulnomad Jack-o-Lantern, in hope of some new crew members actually responding to his polysentience requests. The exact location was described in the invitation message.
Only time would tell what personalities would drive this new adventure, however, and what new corners of the vast rolling expanse they might end up in from these historic crossroads.
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