[@Inkjar] Welcome to the RP! Don’t worry about not having played much of this ilk before, we’re here to help. Now, to answer your questions:

Dragons are cloned from salvaged Shard bio-material. The AION is an artificial intelligence each Dragon has, to give them activity and autonomy, since plugging them into the Shard hive-mind is all sorts of bad. You’d basically just be cloning more enemies, whereas with the AION, you now have your own personal robo-kaiju.

Anyone from the Red Line to the Origin knows who the Shard are in theory. The accuracy of what you know, however, is greater depending on how close to the frontier you are. Most information in Origin is heavily filtered through propaganda, to keep recruiting up. If you’re on the Red Line, you don’t need propoganda to motivate you- you’ve seen them burn enough worlds to know they must be stopped.

No one really knows why the Shard do what they do, only that they are bad news. From the foot soldier “Locusts,” to the living supercarrier “Leviathans,” to the “Patriarchs” that the Dragons are based off of (and built to counter), the Red Line has their hands full, keeping the boundary where it is until they can start pushing back.

This is indeed a story with a beginning, middle, and end. It’s gonna be a wild ride.

Hope that answers everything!