The Swarm (World Building Notes)

@alonicus released a world-building prompt, asking us to talk about swarms in our setting, and what effects they have on people or other creatures in their environment.

Here's A Link To The Prompt, If You Want To Check It Out.

Source

Uncharted Space
Deep in the outer reaches of space, there is an entire region that is dark. From the outside, no one can see in, and to most worlds, it is thought that this region holds a civilization who are isolationist in nature, and has created technology to cloak their entire territory to hide from prying eyes and unwanted guests.

While there have been many explorers who have traveled into the unknown in order to find the secrets that may be lurking there, none have ever returned with any answers or evidence of this phantom civilization. Most believe that whoever is in there doesn't want to be found and they're extremely hostile. Although, many have theorised about this location and cannot help but wonder if some long-extinct race did something long ago, to stop something from leaving this region. There are even religions based around this location, which spawned a popular theory about a planet sized creature, that will bring on the end of the Galaxy.

The Zun-Kullens
On an outer world, with a cluster on the border of uncharted space lives a people who by the standards of Free Space, are ancient. However, they are not as advanced as most would expect and many archeologists have gone to their world to search for ancient ruins that might shed some light on their distant past. However, these digs only raised more questions about them.

Tests were carried out on the Zun-Kullen people, and it was found that they are not native to their home world and they have no idea where they originate. They do have religious texts that have been re-translated and updated so much to the point that after thousands of years, the originals are almost completely lost, other than tid-bits of information.

These texts speak of a time when the Galaxy will be consumed by a giant creature that drifts through space. There is very little story left to paint the full picture, but there is one section that speaks of this entity feeding on the souls of every creature who passes, until it gets so big that it explodes so every world can be remade anew.

No one truly knows, but a doomsday cult did spawn from this idea, and their goal is to randomly kill people and creatures in order to bring on the end times and allow each world to start fresh.

Gnosian Defector
Weeks prior to The Confederation Invasion of Free Space, the Gnosian home world was evacuated and most of the Gnosians in the Galaxy disappeared into Uncharted Space. During the war, they were gone, and most believed them to be dead; killed by whatever lives in there. There were some people though, who jokingly concluded that if anyone could survive Uncharted Space, it was the Gnosians.

There was a defector who came back to Free Space after the dust settled and he spoke of some strange occurrences he witnessed while roving the worlds of that region, looking for spoils.

Yiltrul Banthi was questioned publicly about his experience and while most think the story is made up, some believe that it.

"The first weeks were weird. We just floated through space. The engines worked, but they didn't move right, it was like something outside the ship was disrupting them. Something we couldn't monitor. From the moment we got there, I knew it didn't feel right. Like something was watching us."

"As we got deeper into that region, the navigation system and charts stopped working. First, it was giving us wrong signals, the fleet was to our left, but the ship told us it was on our right, and much larger. Stupid machine. That's when we got separated from the others."

"Those weeks alone were strange; I've been on ships my whole life, traveled more of space than most could dream of, but when we were there, in that darkness, that, nothingness. It wasn't normal. Some of the crew started losing it, and pretty soon our numbers got fewer and fewer."

"The attack came from nowhere, too small to be manned, too small to do damage, but with so many they started to cause trouble. We were able to fend off the assaults, but they were hard to shoot. We landed on a moon to make some repairs, and that's where we saw it. It was some old tech, different than what you'd imagine and we saw those small ships. The debris we made of them was being hauled back to this station and they were either being repaired or recycled so we blew the place up, mainly for what they did to our ship. The funny thing is, when we did, the ships got back to normal and it gave us a chance to get out of there. We met back up with the others, told them what happened and they knew what to do from there on, but that's when I decided it was time to leave that place. The more I think about it, I wonder if it was a good idea to destroy that base."

I enjoyed this prompt and found it to be a good opportunity to talk about this region and the things that dwell there. Also, I actually like this interview-style testimonial from the Gnosian and think I'll incorporate some more stuff like this in any future World-Building posts.