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Description

"Assembly" is the name given for a massive, self-contained and largely isolated cosmological superstructure, as well as the interconnected network of intelligent life that inhabits and influences it. It is roughly 600 million light-years across, contains about 10 quadrillion stars and has a recorded history of about 4 billion years (although it is presumed to have actually been around for much, much longer).

Surrounded on all sides by the dark void, the Assembly has the shape of an oblate spheroid held by gravitational pull. Curiously, it also exhibits an unusual gravity anomaly that causes stars to form graceful elongated filaments and helixes that converge towards a common center, rather than simply clustering into separate galaxies. In this sense, the entire cosmic region can be seen as a singular enormous supergalaxy.

Through an elegant synthesis of natural phenomena and artificial involvement, the Assembly developed a complex multi-layered structure, the details of which will be described below.

* * *

Layer I – Creacon

Creacon is the first planet colonized by the Founders at the beginning of time, thus becoming the hub and the cradle for all subsequent creation. It is located as close to the center of the star cluster as possible.

But perhaps most importantly, Creacon serves as the "central root" from which all portal webs diverge. These biomechanical, wormhole-generating structures (depicted in a picture as white lines) can grow autonomously from planet to planet in a form of branching chains, connecting distant regions of the Assembly together. Among all means of superluminal travel, they have become the most significant, serving as highways that unify all civilizations. The points where the network branches out into a large number of ways (commonly referred to as "nexuses") are especially important — and so they almost always spawn large, prosperous cities around them. Which often seed the entire planet – or even the system – in question with secondary settlements, allowing intelligent life to spread and multiply.

Creacon itself, however, is currently abandoned for historical reasons and thus no longer acts as a world capital – but it still functions as a major portal crossroad anyway. In fact, it functions so well that entire landmasses had slowly drifted onto it through its massive portal gateways, stacking together and forming multitudes of gargantuan ruinous conglomerates – "The History Dump ", as they were colloquially called. By now, about 75% of planet surface are covered with them, and they still keep growing. It had become one of the favorite places for historians, though – as all its ruins can provide some greater insights into the Assembly's mostly obscure past…

Layer II – The Inner Circle

The Inner Circle is an area of particularly dense stellar groups that was largely explored and colonized in the first 300 million years after the founding of Creacon – when the Founders were desperately looking for signs of other intelligent beings in the universe.

Since biomechanical portal webs were fully implemented only after the contact with ionites, the Inner Circle had to be populated through far less effective methods – primarily by sending sub-light probes to distant planets and setting purely mechanical wormholes afterward. For this reason, this layer had been absolutely littered with these old, tangled portal nets (depicted in a picture as white dots) – essentially turning it from a collection of interconnected-yet-separate planets into one seamless (and completely confusing) landscape! Let's just say – to go into someone's basement, walk through a long corridor and suddenly find yourself on the roof of a skyscraper is a completely normal occurrence in these parts.

However, despite all this apparent confusingness, these abundant interconnections are actually quite efficient for both communications and transportation – as each planet is almost guaranteed to have a direct link to at least several thousand others. This led to the Inner Circle to becoming the most densely populated stratum, and almost every major empire eventually moved its capitals in there.

And on top of that, it also contains the engines that keep the universe running. Well, to be more precise – it houses a multitude of ancient, planetary-sized megastructures built by Founders, which constantly generate gravitational vortices to gather the surrounding mater and eject it away in a form of colossal cosmic currents. And by reaching the farthest edges of the world, these fiery streams (depicted in a picture as yellow lines) will not only nourish the suns of the populated planets, but also catalyze the star formations, thereby shaping the structure of the cosmos itself! When observed from the surface, they usually appear as the faint, whitish “veins” branching from star to star – and they can be very beautiful!

Layer III – The Outer Circle

The Outer Circle is, by far, the most wide and large layer of Assembly. Its enormous expanses contain billions upon billions of stars – with only less than 1% been explored, and only less than 1% of that 1% containing something other than mere lifeless rocks.

Colonized parts of the Outer Circle are usually categorized by which branch of the portal web they can be accessed through – with each new planet been given the more and more complicated codenames the farther you go from the center. Meanwhile, the planets themselves will become progressively more deserted and barren as you move away. Halfway through, you can still stumble into some sparse "oases" – lush planets with considerable populations and biospheres, usually homeworlds of various species salvaged by Apostles – but after that, any diversity will gradually cease, until all that’s left of your path are just a gate, a short road to a next gate, and the endless wasteland around. Rinse and repeat, until the end of a branch.

Sometimes, however, you can encounter one of the rare, eerie places referred to as the "stillborn towns". These are towns that had been automatically self-assembled around some particularly large portals, but had never been populated by anyone in a first place. Since they usually have various self-sustaining mechanisms, they can be surprisingly hard to identify at the first glance. The lights will be on, the lawns will be trimmed, the streets will be clean – so it will take some time to realize that the whole town is actually empty. But such tricky illusions of life can quite often be broken by the malfunctions of the town’s "genetic code", resulting in some rather surreal imagery – doors far above the ground, windows leading to nowhere, rooms with no entrance and other peculiar mutations. Most of the time, however, such towns are pretty harmless, and can even provide some shelter of sustenance for travelers – but sometimes, they can develop various defense systems that, in absence of any maintenance or moderation, can quickly go completely wild and start attacking every trespasser! Furthermore, some travelers had even told stories about towns that have turned completely predatory, evolving their doors into mouths and rooms into stomachs – but most of such claims was eventually dismissed as just gross exaggerations. Most…

And finally, there are also the "cancerous towns" – a logical conclusion of all that was mentioned above. For when the amount of mutations becomes just too massive for a town to bear, its mechanisms can break completely – and it’ll start to grow uncontrollably, devouring the surrounding land. The farther it grows, the less structured it becomes – until it finally devolves into a formless mess of concrete and metal that are no longer even resembling building in any conceivable way. Given enough time, such architectural tumors will engulf their entire planets – and can even start spreading to the nearby ones through the portal gates. A not very good sign in case there is a regular, populated city just a few portals away…

And all that been said, it becomes pretty clear that the Outer Circle is a pretty ominous place, most of which ranges from a wild frontiers to just straight up hellscapes! It’s vast and strange and confusing. So no wonder that many shady individual and organizations – who don’t want the rest of the world to know their dark secrets – had chosen this layer as their main place of hiding!

The Relic Fields

The so called "Relic Fields" are the enormous region of starless void that surrounds the Assembly from all sides. And while technically not considered to be a part of it, they will still be listened here as such – just for the sake of convenience.

The scope of the Fields is astonishing! They exceed the size of the Assembly a thousand times – and stretch far, far beyond the particle horizon. Due to a poorly understood anomaly – possibly rooted in dark matter – all available space-warping technologies do not work there, rendering both wormholes and FTL engines completely useless for navigation.

But they are not entirely void, however. For some particularly powerful telescopes build by Founders managed to detect what appeared to be the small stellar groups far beyond the edge of the Outer Circle. None of them was even remotely comparable to the Assembly in terms of size, but they were still concluded to be potentially suitable for the intelligent life. These lesser star clusters had been labeled the “Lost Archipelagos”, and the question of whether or not they can house their own space-faring civilizations – developed completely independently from the will of the Founders – or even something even more alien, has become one of the most debated topics among both travelers and philosophers alike. But for the reasons described above, no definitive answers have been discovers – and it’s pretty unlikely that they ever will be. But the future is uncertain, so who know how the thing may turn out…

And finally, it is worth to mention that despite their truly incomprehensible scale, the Relic Fields are believed to still be finite in their size. This, in turn, implies the existence of a border, which may or may not be actually traversable – or even reachable at all. And beyond it lies the fifth and the final layer of Assembly…

The Abyss

The Abyss is a primordial ontological singularity, having neither beginning nor end.

It possesses no matter and no space-time as we know them per se, but instead contains an indeterminate number of fluctuating probability oscillations that can only be described by the very specific laws of quantum mechanics. Some, but not all, of such oscillations can cause an act of nucleation – a formation of temporary regions with the altered physical constants. Most of such occurrences happen for a fraction of a second and only on a subatomic scale – but some linger for much longer. And this process – along with the rapid expansion of the altered regions and the subsequent precipitation of the background energy into various kinds of matter – results in a constant formation of everlasting and ever-expanding multitude of "universes", one of which is the Assembly.

Due to a non-entity nature of the Abyss, it cannot be physically accessed – but it can indeed be traversed by bending the space itself into it! It has been theorized that with enough energy, it can be possible to create a wormhole leading to a completely different, causally unrelated yet physically compatible realm – the fabled "Omega Gate"!

And astonishingly enough, such gate has actually been opened – but only for a mere seconds, and only once! All the subsequent tries to replicate the process had failed, and the attempts to reopen the original one had led to a conclusion that the passage has been somehow blocked from the other side.

Until one day…

Description

"Assembly" is the name given for a massive, self-contained and largely isolated cosmological superstructure, as well as the interconnected network of intelligent life that inhabits and influences it. It is roughly 600 million light-years across, contains about 10 quadrillion stars and has a recorded history of about 4 billion years (although it is presumed to have actually been around for much, much longer).

Surrounded on all sides by the dark void, the Assembly has the shape of an oblate spheroid held by gravitational pull. Curiously, it also exhibits an unusual gravity anomaly that causes stars to form graceful elongated filaments and helixes that converge towards a common center, rather than simply clustering into separate galaxies. In this sense, the entire cosmic region can be seen as a singular enormous supergalaxy.

Through an elegant synthesis of natural phenomena and artificial involvement, the Assembly developed a complex multi-layered structure, the details of which will be described below.

* * *

Layer I – Creacon

Creacon is the first planet colonized by the Founders at the beginning of time, thus becoming the hub and the cradle for all subsequent creation. It is located as close to the center of the star cluster as possible.

But perhaps most importantly, Creacon serves as the "central root" from which all portal webs diverge. These biomechanical, wormhole-generating structures (depicted in a picture as white lines) can grow autonomously from planet to planet in a form of branching chains, connecting distant regions of the Assembly together. Among all means of superluminal travel, they have become the most significant, serving as highways that unify all civilizations. The points where the network branches out into a large number of ways (commonly referred to as "nexuses") are especially important — and so they almost always spawn large, prosperous cities around them. Which often seed the entire planet – or even the system – in question with secondary settlements, allowing intelligent life to spread and multiply.

Creacon itself, however, is currently abandoned for historical reasons and thus no longer acts as a world capital – but it still functions as a major portal crossroad anyway. In fact, it functions so well that entire landmasses had slowly drifted onto it through its massive portal gateways, stacking together and forming multitudes of gargantuan ruinous conglomerates – "The History Dump ", as they were colloquially called. By now, about 75% of planet surface are covered with them, and they still keep growing. It had become one of the favorite places for historians, though – as all its ruins can provide some greater insights into the Assembly's mostly obscure past…

Layer II – The Inner Circle

The Inner Circle is an area of particularly dense stellar groups that was largely explored and colonized in the first 300 million years after the founding of Creacon – when the Founders were desperately looking for signs of other intelligent beings in the universe.

Since biomechanical portal webs were fully implemented only after the contact with ionites, the Inner Circle had to be populated through far less effective methods – primarily by sending sub-light probes to distant planets and setting purely mechanical wormholes afterward. For this reason, this layer had been absolutely littered with these old, tangled portal nets (depicted in a picture as white dots) – essentially turning it from a collection of interconnected-yet-separate planets into one seamless (and completely confusing) landscape! Let's just say – to go into someone's basement, walk through a long corridor and suddenly find yourself on the roof of a skyscraper is a completely normal occurrence in these parts.

However, despite all this apparent confusingness, these abundant interconnections are actually quite efficient for both communications and transportation – as each planet is almost guaranteed to have a direct link to at least several thousand others. This led to the Inner Circle to becoming the most densely populated stratum, and almost every major empire eventually moved its capitals in there.

And on top of that, it also contains the engines that keep the universe running. Well, to be more precise – it houses a multitude of ancient, planetary-sized megastructures built by Founders, which constantly generate gravitational vortices to gather the surrounding mater and eject it away in a form of colossal cosmic currents. And by reaching the farthest edges of the world, these fiery streams (depicted in a picture as yellow lines) will not only nourish the suns of the populated planets, but also catalyze the star formations, thereby shaping the structure of the cosmos itself! When observed from the surface, they usually appear as the faint, whitish “veins” branching from star to star – and they can be very beautiful!

Layer III – The Outer Circle

The Outer Circle is, by far, the most wide and large layer of Assembly. Its enormous expanses contain billions upon billions of stars – with only less than 1% been explored, and only less than 1% of that 1% containing something other than mere lifeless rocks.

Colonized parts of the Outer Circle are usually categorized by which branch of the portal web they can be accessed through – with each new planet been given the more and more complicated codenames the farther you go from the center. Meanwhile, the planets themselves will become progressively more deserted and barren as you move away. Halfway through, you can still stumble into some sparse "oases" – lush planets with considerable populations and biospheres, usually homeworlds of various species salvaged by Apostles – but after that, any diversity will gradually cease, until all that’s left of your path are just a gate, a short road to a next gate, and the endless wasteland around. Rinse and repeat, until the end of a branch.

Sometimes, however, you can encounter one of the rare, eerie places referred to as the "stillborn towns". These are towns that had been automatically self-assembled around some particularly large portals, but had never been populated by anyone in a first place. Since they usually have various self-sustaining mechanisms, they can be surprisingly hard to identify at the first glance. The lights will be on, the lawns will be trimmed, the streets will be clean – so it will take some time to realize that the whole town is actually empty. But such tricky illusions of life can quite often be broken by the malfunctions of the town’s "genetic code", resulting in some rather surreal imagery – doors far above the ground, windows leading to nowhere, rooms with no entrance and other peculiar mutations. Most of the time, however, such towns are pretty harmless, and can even provide some shelter of sustenance for travelers – but sometimes, they can develop various defense systems that, in absence of any maintenance or moderation, can quickly go completely wild and start attacking every trespasser! Furthermore, some travelers had even told stories about towns that have turned completely predatory, evolving their doors into mouths and rooms into stomachs – but most of such claims was eventually dismissed as just gross exaggerations. Most…

And finally, there are also the "cancerous towns" – a logical conclusion of all that was mentioned above. For when the amount of mutations becomes just too massive for a town to bear, its mechanisms can break completely – and it’ll start to grow uncontrollably, devouring the surrounding land. The farther it grows, the less structured it becomes – until it finally devolves into a formless mess of concrete and metal that are no longer even resembling building in any conceivable way. Given enough time, such architectural tumors will engulf their entire planets – and can even start spreading to the nearby ones through the portal gates. A not very good sign in case there is a regular, populated city just a few portals away…

And all that been said, it becomes pretty clear that the Outer Circle is a pretty ominous place, most of which ranges from a wild frontiers to just straight up hellscapes! It’s vast and strange and confusing. So no wonder that many shady individual and organizations – who don’t want the rest of the world to know their dark secrets – had chosen this layer as their main place of hiding!

The Relic Fields

The so called "Relic Fields" are the enormous region of starless void that surrounds the Assembly from all sides. And while technically not considered to be a part of it, they will still be listened here as such – just for the sake of convenience.

The scope of the Fields is astonishing! They exceed the size of the Assembly a thousand times – and stretch far, far beyond the particle horizon. Due to a poorly understood anomaly – possibly rooted in dark matter – all available space-warping technologies do not work there, rendering both wormholes and FTL engines completely useless for navigation.

But they are not entirely void, however. For some particularly powerful telescopes build by Founders managed to detect what appeared to be the small stellar groups far beyond the edge of the Outer Circle. None of them was even remotely comparable to the Assembly in terms of size, but they were still concluded to be potentially suitable for the intelligent life. These lesser star clusters had been labeled the “Lost Archipelagos”, and the question of whether or not they can house their own space-faring civilizations – developed completely independently from the will of the Founders – or even something even more alien, has become one of the most debated topics among both travelers and philosophers alike. But for the reasons described above, no definitive answers have been discovers – and it’s pretty unlikely that they ever will be. But the future is uncertain, so who know how the thing may turn out…

And finally, it is worth to mention that despite their truly incomprehensible scale, the Relic Fields are believed to still be finite in their size. This, in turn, implies the existence of a border, which may or may not be actually traversable – or even reachable at all. And beyond it lies the fifth and the final layer of Assembly…

The Abyss

The Abyss is a primordial ontological singularity, having neither beginning nor end.

It possesses no matter and no space-time as we know them per se, but instead contains an indeterminate number of fluctuating probability oscillations that can only be described by the very specific laws of quantum mechanics. Some, but not all, of such oscillations can cause an act of nucleation – a formation of temporary regions with the altered physical constants. Most of such occurrences happen for a fraction of a second and only on a subatomic scale – but some linger for much longer. And this process – along with the rapid expansion of the altered regions and the subsequent precipitation of the background energy into various kinds of matter – results in a constant formation of everlasting and ever-expanding multitude of "universes", one of which is the Assembly.

Due to a non-entity nature of the Abyss, it cannot be physically accessed – but it can indeed be traversed by bending the space itself into it! It has been theorized that with enough energy, it can be possible to create a wormhole leading to a completely different, causally unrelated yet physically compatible realm – the fabled "Omega Gate"!

And astonishingly enough, such gate has actually been opened – but only for a mere seconds, and only once! All the subsequent tries to replicate the process had failed, and the attempts to reopen the original one had led to a conclusion that the passage has been somehow blocked from the other side.

Until one day…