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[hider=Intro Narration]
[center]”[i]Through Hardship, to the Stars.[/i]”[/center]


”[i]Empires will rise and empires will fall. Worlds will grow, and flourish, and wither, and die. Galaxies will form, and spin, and grow, and one day will explode in a shower of dust and sparks hundreds of light-years wide.

And the Universe will continue. It does not care about the fragile webs of dust that are galaxies, the insignificant flecks of dirt that are the worlds. They appear and disappear in a cycle of thought or less. Never something more than a passing distraction, or a game. As significant as dust motes are to the small child who plays in the sun; perhaps a distraction for a time, something to swat at or play with, but not something to have an emotional investment in.

The Universe, for a time, was content with just a few of these dust motes. Sometimes it would entertain itself with cultivating a new world and a new race. A pair exceedingly ill-matched for one another. Perhaps an aquatic race that flourished until a drought seized the planet. The Universe would watch with a kind of glee as its creations withered and died.

For a long time, a few worlds, in varying stages of decay, were enough to keep it amused. But soon it grew bored. It required more. So it made itself a sandbox. It created a trillion worlds and a trillion races. It watched them all disintegrate, one by one, as time continued its slow march.

But the destruction, after a while, ceased to amuse it. It did not like watching inanimate objects. Which is what its creations were. They did not think for themselves, they did not grow and develop unless It was to cause them to grow.

So it created a billion more worlds and billion more races. But to these, it gave the gift of sentience. So that they could, themselves, grow and develop and conquer and destroy and it could simply watch.

But these worlds required more supervision, and a few slipped away from It. It was dazzled by the carnage that these sentient races could wreak havoc on one another. So It watched. It pitted them against each other. But It was so involved that it failed to notice other worlds; It failed to notice them growing and thriving and their people flourishing, spreading across all the systems It had created.

When It finally noticed, It was furious that the people had done Its job, had created and grown and flourished. Every civilization was struck down, every being simultaneously ceasing to exist. There was no warning. They just… disappeared. As though they had never existed in the first place.

It destroyed the people, but not the worlds they had inhabited. Because It was almost proud of the accomplishment, the way a father is proud of his son’s creation. It wanted to preserve the worlds forever, as a reminder, both a warning and a souvenir, to itself, of what civilization could become.

For eternity It had caused only death and suffering. But now it had seen the fruits of growth, of kindness. It had changed.

This time, when it seeded Its worlds, it controlled only a few. It needed the suffering; it craved it. But it also needed the culture, it also needed the life. A few it watched; a few it ruled. It watched them, from a distance, as they grew, as they created starships, as they seeded life into the barren worlds that It had destroyed. As they imagined, as they sent ships faster than light spreading words of their Creators. They worshipped their own Gods, and their own Goddesses, as the ones who had brought them life.

And though they may not have been bringing praise to the right entity, they were praising it. And it was proud.

But other entities took note, and came from outside the universe. They brought their own creations to the universe, they let their own creations grow on the planets that It had created.

It was angry, as it saw its creations taken and changed into forms it had never conceived of. It fought with these other entities to take back what it saw as its own, but the fight quickly became a stalemate. The entities and the Universe were of equal power, and so, as they would destroy each other's creations, they would merely create lives anew. The war became a never-ending cycle of destruction and rebirth. Species were wiped out, others rose through the sheer miracle of randomness and Time, species left unchecked by any of the entities.

The Universe and the entities halted in their struggle. Neither saw any point in continuing the futile war. But as the Entities went on and cultivated their creations, the Universe became filled with hate. It watched the other entities and their creations, and wanted to destroy them, even if it meant the loss of its own. Even if it meant destroying 

And so it formulated its plan to strike back at the entities that had originally decided to interfere with its creation. It ripped its power out of itself and created a new dimension also contained within the fabric of space, and it created four new entities, all with the sole purpose of destruction. It receded, now a mere observer in the game, having stripped itself of its power.

The creations battled with the outsiders, destroying all that the Universe had worked so hard to create. The outsiders fought the four creations off eventually, but at the cost of complete destruction of all they had built. Their realm was a wasteland, and they were crippled. They knew they had left their enemy in the same state, that the four retreated to lick their wounds and attempt to rally their strength. They knew that it was only a matter of time until the Four would resurface and the cycle would repeat, unless...

The Outsiders, now the masters of what had been The Universe’s realm, realized that the only hope for ever decisively defeating the four was for their own creations to fight them off. Some were given the power of their creators, an energy that could be used to create or destroy by their will alone. Some were guided to find the ruins of ancient civilizations, the silent cities and wasted planets of the Universe, of the Four, and of the Outsiders themselves. They would learn what had happened.

And all the while the Four lay in wait, in exile beyond the senses of even the Outsiders. Watching. Waiting for the right moment to strike.[/i]”

[/hider]

And with the fluff and narration out of the way, welcome to Per Aspera Ad Astra, a freeform Sci-Fi Fantasy NRP.

Some you may notice the fantasy tag, what that means is that magic as well as any other supernatural force may be used freely. This also means that even non-magical factions will probably being using plenty of handwavium. I also love the concept of mixing magic and technology, aka magitech. For those of you who want to play purely tech factions however, I consider magic and technology mostly equal, magic just being around to be a fun element to drive plots and write cool scenes

Gods and Goddesses will also come up as a story element in this NRP. This is however not an excuse to use them as a weapon or to directly intervene in the story. Their purpose serves as a mentor and a creator of some species, occasionally speaking to certain members of their species or giving them visions so that they may be guided along a certain path. 

Beyond that I don’t have much to say beyond giving thanks to [@RomanAria] for helping write great portion of the intro and who will help be a Co-GM when the IC goes up.

Feel free to ask questions or address comments and concerns.