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Post by Insano-Man on Jan 9, 2019 22:07:10 GMT -5
This topic is a child of the Zorah's Eye article directory.BIGGER ON THE INSIDEThe Eye itself gets a lot of attention. It's one of the big anomalous zones on the planet that no one's figured out. It's the source of all the spooky stuff going on around it; the Iris, the Gaze, and everything related. The truth of Zorah's Eye is that it's really just a big door. Dive in from above and the house beyond opens up to you. Inside the Eye is a gate to a galaxy in miniature; a big expanse of stars, planets, and half-demolecularized debris floating around in the depths of space. Inside is the biggest anomalous zone ever discovered - and it's never the same place twice. SECTIONS- Traversing the Eye- Subrealities & Blinks- Population
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Post by Insano-Man on Jan 12, 2019 0:09:13 GMT -5
TRAVERSING THE EYE
Diving into the Eye is either the most exciting thing you'll ever do or the last thing you'll ever do. Getting into the gateway is a gauntlet that involves swooping up to the Scuttler Slice or high orbit. Up there, at the Gaze's edge, marauders and harvesters make a living off of Eye divers coming and going. After that, it's a plunge straight down into a light bright enough to soften up sensors, solar panels, and hull plating. All the while, you've got to stay right on-target to keep from shearing in half against the Gaze's wall. Meanwhile, any amount of drifting debris or hiding Gazers could jump in front of you, sending both you and your collision buddy off into the wall in a hundred new pieces.
If you're lucky enough to pass through the Eye - which is only just wide enough to fit a dreadnought through - you'll be hit with two things. The first is a special kind of jump sickness that feels like a hard reboot on every nerve ending in your body. The second is a view of a broken cosmos. The space inside the Eye is something like a child's drawing of a solar system. Every planet, star, and sludgy ex-spaceship is too long, too wide, bent somewhere, or just so mixed up that it's hard to tell what it used to be. Meanwhile, there's just too little of it. The starfield is empty and what little's leftover doesn't have enough room to spread out like a natural star system. Compacted nebulae form a misty backdrop with a wild palette, usually clustered around specific points of interest.
The maximum count of celestial bodies inside Zorah's Eye is somewhere around forty or fifty after any given collapse. Most are stars, but there are usually plenty of planets to explore. Most rotations include at least one asteroid field or patch of planetary remnants. The Eye's inhabitants are typically condensed into an improbable space of around three decently-sized star systems in size, just close enough to reach on impulse engines. An odd quirk about the Eye is that most objects on the inside are familiar. Remnants of departed harvester fleets, planets from Set's previous home system, and other old space buddies are regular residents. Not many are happy to be there - if they haven't been torn to pieces by the relocation. Beyond the immediate cluster is absolutely nothing; empty blackness as far as a ship can go.
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Post by Insano-Man on Jan 12, 2019 0:09:23 GMT -5
SUBREALITIES & BLINKS
As one big terrorscape, all of the crazy physics are just fine by the Eye. It all plays out like a spacer's spin on the Chambers of Myth. Close in on one of the planets or stars and a new kind of reality takes over. Light straightens out, gravity reasserts itself, and the laws of physics conform to the local standard. Not everyone or everything survives the transition, but the shift is usually tame enough to keep genes from unravelling and thermodynamics from backfiring. Just about every patch of space has its own ruleset to work with and its own host of changes to go through. What those are going to be, no one can say for certain.
Once inside any particular bubble of reality, the nature of the Eye starts looking a little more clear. As one big terrorscape, things don't exactly work right inside. Planets bask in the glow of stars that don't exist. Nebulae cluster around ethereal gravity wells. Celestial bodies orbit around nothing and ignore gravity from objects outside their subreality's area of influence. Most stars are dying or trapped in some kind of time-locked state of frozen death. Most planets are barren, broken, and either tearing themselves apart or collapsing into themselves. All the while, bubbles of scrap and stone drift around; the last remaining pieces of the things that didn't survive a reality shift, or the ships that didn't make it out of the Eye in time.
Just like exploring the Lost Reach, diving into the Eye is something that has to be done on a strict time budget. Whenever Set makes a jump - and at random times in between - the space inside the Eye collapses and shuffles itself. For anything inside, that means being thrown into a quantum hurricane of temporal incoherence and subatomic skulduggery. Sometimes, planets and stellar bodies survive. Most of them end up as pulpy, bubbly rings of half-melted, half-decorporealized asteroids. Ships - and especially the people inside them - usually don't even leave more than dust and vapor behind. Once it's all done, a new set of celestial objects pops into place with their own set of local realities.
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Post by Insano-Man on Jan 12, 2019 0:09:35 GMT -5
POPULATION
Denizens of the Eye are mostly from Set. They're a mix of the desperate, daredevils, and dangerous mixes of both. They're scrappers, explorers, and scientists with a death wish, usually looking to hit up a planet for some speedy adventure. Unionites are some of the most common of the bunch, typically with a Unity Trust assignment under their belt. None of them stay for long. On rare occasions, a planet pops into the Eye with life still on it. It usually ends up as a hotspot for spacer tourism - and an encore performance of the sorassan exodus. Whenever a planet ends up in the Eye, the native inhabitants have no idea how it happened. Usually, they don't care, either, and Set is the only place they have left to go.
For that purpose and for the sake of scientific exploration, the Unity Trust maintains a small network of navigation buoys leading to the Eye's exit. A regular line of scout drones monitors the Eye for a collapse. When needed, a few freight drones fly out from Unity Station to deposit a new set of buoys and check for survivors. For most divers, it's a godsend; the exit to Set is a blank patch of space with no identifying features whatsoever. Likewise, hitting the exit from the wrong angle means either colliding with the Gaze's wall or slamming head-first into the underground below Set's gateway.
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