Life as an Expeditionary can be as short as it is dangerous. But for those who can withstand the extreme isolation of deep space, the unrelenting dangers of uncharted worlds, and the constant threat of attack from criminals and pirates, Expeditionary work is arguably the most lucrative contract work that there is.
With 10 years experience as an Expeditionary and security contractor, Riot McMann has established himself as an authority in both fields. His deep knowledge of interstellar frontiers is matched only by an expertise in a multitude of combat disciplines, developed and refined over a decade of surveying unknown regions of space with ravenous criminals haranguing him along the way. He is a tier one Expeditionary, a brutally efficient warrior, elite amongst the elite. Yet all that may not be enough, as lurking along the edges of civilized space, unknown to humanity at large, a starved and voracious nightmare looms with its eyes set squarely on the Elytrian Ecliptic and each of the 150 billion people who live within it.
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THE ADVENTURES OF WINSTON & SWEETIE
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SHOP
UNIVERSE & LORE
Riot McMann
Owner of McMann Expeditionary & Security Consultants, Riot has built a reputation as one of the most brutally efficient and dangerous Expeditionaries across the Elytrian Ecliptic, a man who finds his zen in places where few others dare to go. With a decade’s worth of experience operating in inhospitable places surrounded by the most notorious criminals and mercenaries, McMann’s experience and unconventional tactics have made him one of the most sought after security experts in the industry.
SIR WINSTON
Originally heir to the throne of Terrieria, Sir Winston abdicated in order to accompany his sister, Sweetie when she decided to leave the planet to pursue far grander goals than a pampered royal lifestyle would allow. Having been trained in a variety of combat disciplines from youth with many years of active military service, Winston is as dangerous as he is loyal. With patience and wisdom well beyond his years, Winston is precisely the counterbalance Sweetie needs to keep herself level headed.
SWEETIE
Though her life had been spent in pampered luxury, Sweetie had always felt more at home in the armory workshops of Castle Wyclef than she had in a ball gown. Where her brothers and sisters preferred operas and dinner parties, Sweetie preferred piloting her battle mech, a gift from an emissary that hoped- and failed- to sign Terrieria as a member planet of the Grand Coalition.
Stubborn, impetuous, and hot headed, Sweetie never fit in with her family and the royal lifestyle. After a fiery and violent first outing on the orbital city of Vharrok, Sweetie and Winston set off to explore the Elytrian Ecliptic, expand her hotel business, and step into her new role as the newly established leader of the mech faction, Cobalt Horizon.
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THE ADVENTURES OF WINSTON & SWEETIE
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SHOP
The Rift Network
The Rift Network is a series of compressed spacetime corridors, known as Rift Lanes, that form the backbone of the Elytrian Ecliptic’s interstellar society. Suspended between two large ring-shaped installations, Rift Lanes can traverse distances up to 12 lightyears and branch outwards from the center of the Ecliptic like spokes on a wheel: eight spokes laterally, eight spokes angled upward, and eight angled downward. With the massive amounts of energy to establish and maintain hundreds of Rift Lanes, the Rift Network draws its power from a solar capture array known as the Nova Array. Rift Lanes are the conduits through which power is transmitted to subsequent Rift Nexuses. Each time power passes along a Rift Lane, part of it is lost along the length of the Rift Lane. Eventually, after passing through enough Rift Lanes, the energy gathered from the Nova Array can no longer sustain a Rift Nexus. It is at this point that the boundaries of the Elytrian Ecliptic are drawn: the Grand Coalition cannot feasibly maintain dominance past that point.
Though there is variation in the overall length of a Rift Lane, the amount of spacetime compression that takes place between two Rift Nexuses- or “Sister Nexuses”- varies in order to establish a precise 3-Day transit time for ships traveling at the strictly regulated speed of 400,000 kilometers per hour. In certain situations, the Grand Coalition military may redirect power along certain Rift Lanes to maximize compression and dramatically reduce transit times. This, of course, increases travel time everywhere else and is an action that is taken only in existential emergencies.
The Rift Network is an interstellar system of gateways that enables faster-than-light travel and communication across the Elytrian Ecliptic.
The Rift Network is vital to the Elytrian Ecliptic’s economic and geopolitical stability as well as its overall cohesion. Whether enabling rapid travel across vast interstellar distances, instantaneous digital communication, or adjusting and interpolating local data streams and astrometrical data points to account for relativity, the Rift Network is vital to the success and stability of the Elytrian Ecliptic.
The TEYGRAN HIVEMIND
Little is known about the Teygran hivemind though the general consensus is that it’s an organism that is millions of years old. Expert opinions vary but, speaking in broad strokes, it’s believed that the Teygran hivemind evolved from an intelligent race of humanoids with a moderate level of technological advancement. Natural selection, they believe, prioritized enrichment of the collective while leaving individualism behind to flounder and die in the primordial ooze.
Human intelligence evolved around the prioritization of its own survival, the perpetuation of its genetic material, and an inexorable propensity to be as stupid and lazy as nature allows it to be. To the typical human mind, few concepts are more repulsive than discipline or self-denial. The Teygrans leverage this, along with a myriad other baser tendencies found within human behavior, in order to subvert the human consciousness and coerce it into hivemind assimilation.
Assimilation happens through what’s known as the Teygran Meme. Though little is known about about meme transmission, what’s certain is that the Teygran Meme embeds itself within every possible form of stimuli detectable by a living organism and plants roots within the subconscious regions of the brain. There it will grow and gradually gain control over the brain’s automatic processes with the ultimate goal of aligning the host mind with that of other infected brains. Once two or more minds reach a certain level of alignment, whether through physical or digital means, assimilation becomes a self-sustaining process and maintains this trajectory until changes in thoughts and actions are almost instantaneous between connected organisms. From there, the host brains are inextricably linked to the Teygran hivemind, each brain adding its own processing power to that of the collective, while also serving as additional vectors for further transmission of the Teygran Meme.
If the Teygran hivemind were a brain then each individual organism within it would be a neuron: these individual organisms are referred to as “extremities”. A small portion of each brain, roughly one to two percent, is reserved for the consciousness that was once its sole occupant. Some people who are assimilated are oblivious to it, others are glad of it, though attributable to both is an endless capacity for deep rationalization and denial, even as their bodies are twisted, their bones broken, and their corporeal form mutated and molded into one that is of greatest service to the Teygran hivemind.
Teygrans are a single consciousness with roughly the same relative size to the swarm as human consciousness has to the brain: roughly five to ten percent. Its actions and decision making are deeply rooted in emotion and self-gratification much like the individual organisms that it assimilates. Though inextricably emotional, the Teygran hivemind is capable of recruiting the processing power of each of the billions of organisms within its neural network while physically mutating the attached organic matter into forms best suited for service to the swarm. A single human brain is capable of performing one exaflop- or one quintillion- operations per second. In terms of processing power, in a hivemind with numbers in excess of 10 billion, it takes less than 100 Teygran extremities to outperform the Coalition’s most advanced quantum computers.
As a military force, the Teygrans are unmatched. There is no chain of command, no delays in the formulation and implementation of strategies, everything happens simultaneously and without hesitation. Its capacity for adaptation, changes in tactics and troop deployment, and an ability to merge its own organic material with enemy technology make it endlessly formidable. No military, not even that of the Grand Coalition, has ever defeated the Teygrans once they’ve made landfall while direct engagement of a Teygran fleet has a success rate in the single digits.
Riot McMann, however, is not a military: he is a single man, and it was on the surface of Terrieria where he handed the Teygran hivemind its only known defeat with nothing more than a lightly armored exosuit and a warblade, aptly named “The Diplomat”. In a universe where a single fleet of warships can turn a planet to black glass, how McMann succeeded where entire armies had failed can only be speculated. The Teygran hivemind is as vindictive as it is intelligent, however, and accepting defeat is something that it simply can’t do.
TERRIERIA
Homeworld of Sir Winston and Sweetie and the seat of House Wyclef, rulers of the terriers.
Three thousand years before McMann’s birth, humanity tried- and failed- to settle a planet that would become known as Terrieria. The settlers, lead by a deposed Elytrian monarch, left Elytria as part of a mass exodus that was a direct consequence of a revolution that took back control from the Coalition after it sought to consolidate its own power by assuming authoritarian control over the planet.
Wishing to avoid a second Coalition power grab, the monarch, their family, their prized Scottish Terriers, and nearly one hundred thousand settlers, departed Elytria in search of a world of their own. Three decades later, the five colony ships that carried them would arrive at a small, coniferous planet that would eventually be named Terrieria. After 200 years of rapid expansion and urban development, the royal family, along with its entire human population, vanished without a trace. No historical record exists that provides clues as to where they went or why. Proof of their existence lies only in the magnificent castles, the intricate art, the advanced technologies, and the agriculture, livestock, and pets that they left behind. Little is certain about what happened next, only that the small population of Scottish Terriers left behind by the royal family, over the thousands of years that followed, would become the planet’s dominant species and evolve into a hyper intelligent race with intellects that exceed that of the most gifted humans by orders of magnitude.
Though their technology is on the same level as the Grand Coalition, even exceeding it in some ways, the Terriers have no ambitions or geopolitical aspirations beyond their own star system. As intelligent and advanced as they may be, the Terriers have no interest in adventure and the wonders of the universe and are perfectly content finding a nice patch of grass beneath a shady tree to take an afternoon nap.