[i]There has to be a way.[/i]

Together you enter the Solar System.

It is like coming home after a very long journey. As you approach the door all of that exhaustion starts to hit. Not just yours, the entire bloodline's from the moment it passed through that vast and intricate protogate into the far beyond. Ever since humanity left its cradle for the stars it invited upon itself a dream of infinite labour. Ever since then everything related to you spiraling back a million generations has sweated and struggled and fought to bring order to the cosmos. Adam was not cursed for leaving the Garden, he was cursed [i]by [/i]leaving the Garden.

And in this moment you feel it. You feel it all, in the promise of an ending. You feel the people who you used to be down a spiraling double-helix staircase of reincarnation. You feel the weight only in the possibility of getting to lay it down. This impending relief is exquisitely painful; you [i]feel [/i]the weight, and you feel too the anxiety. What if this is not as you have left it? What if it is dirty, or violent, or broken? What drove the people to leave this place in the first place? Has it grown worse? What if all of the outside world has somehow gotten inside and it isn't like your soul remembers it to be?

Nine planets. One small, yellow sun. Everywhere the infrastructure of a civilization that had outgrown its nest.

Start with the first, your arrival point: the planet of Pluto. Once it had been a mere planetoid, but the vast network of refueling and interstellar launch stations that had been constructed around it nudged it up a category. A quantum catapult; a crude precursor to the Gateway Network that bound the galaxy together in the Age of Knights - but now its time has surprisingly come around again as it seamlessly plugs into the modern network of Slipgates that holds together the Endless Azure Skies. As old and wan as its beacon might be, the Plousios slides in through it smoothly and frictionlessly. The former planetoid below is a nightmare pipe junction, refinery spaghetti of endless liquid and chemical flows built in real time by engineers trying to debug their mad machinery. 

Once, long ago, enormous fleets had passed through this gateway, carrying the ambitious explorers of humanity with them. They never came back. They spread their civilization across a million stars but they never looked back here. There were no resources to exploit after all. There was no art or history; what little had survived the aeons had been piled aboard the journeying fleets and secured in the vaults of the [i]Tunguska[/i]. What use had humanity for its own eggshells at a time when the galaxy lay at its feet?

And so the wreckage of civilization drifts silently around Pluto. Nobody has disturbed this gateway since. It passed into memory, and then into dream, and then into oblivion aeons ago. That was how it met Hades who had cast a funeral shroud over this living corpse and tried to take it into himself. You can feel that knowledge, that yearning alongside your own; the box deep within the Plousios, the message for this place untouched by the Skies, starts to call out as you draw close. Down through this museum and graveyard and forgotten world. Counting down to three.