The Floozies

Those that would come to be called the Floozies came from a universe rich in biological life. The ascension war that came at the end destroyed vast ecologies of beauty, natural wonders the likes of which will never been seen again. With heavy hearts, the Floozies swore that they would make the galaxy come alive once more. They were opposed in this noble goal by the Obelisk Dreamers, who wished to turn the galaxy into their own narcissistic reflection, and by the Gnomics, who wished to fill the cosmos  with sterile machines.

To prosecute their war, the Floozies needed weapons and warriors. They started with a few hidden hot house worlds where they could grow the seeds of an army.  Life on these worlds was designed to be quick and brutal, the founder organisms chosen for their rapid life cycles. From these cauldrons of life the Floozies harvested many bioweapons, and raised many creature up to sapience to serve as soldiers.

The next phase of their war plan was to spread life throughout the galaxy.  They built fleets of simple rip drive probes to carry spores. Every world they crashed into became the site of a new ecosystem.  This early land rush was mirrored in the actions of the other bastards as they also sent out probes to colonize new worlds. After a quick thousand years or so, most of the galaxy had been visited by one power or another, laying the seeds of future empire.

As the war smoldered on, the Floozies began the practice that would earn them their epithet. Whenever they found life on a planet, they would raise the most promising sentients into full sapience and induct them into the empire. The Floozy empire grew rapidly and unpredictably. The most uncharitable histories paint this as a sort of cosmic pyramid scheme; by enlightening others they earned themselves servants and allies who in turn would uplift other races for their own benefit. The Floozies and their modern admirers saw this as an ever growing commonwealth of races, each enriched by the others.

They say the Floozies were the true winners of the Bastard War; that they outlasted their enemies. If this is true, it didn't do them any good. Without a common enemy the empire dissolved into a thousand squabbling remnants. The original Floozies that had come over from the last universe were lost to history, killed in civil wars or evolved beyond recognition.  Their empire rotted away, new life growing out of its broken corpse. They had brought life into the galaxy, at the cost of their existence.

Bastard Legacies - The Floozies: 

Mothercorp is an intergalactic agricultural firm owned by the sapient plant creatures known as Jezoflorids. Their principle crop are their own children, who they contract out as indentured servants. After they reached adulthood, they are free. Mothercorp has a fearsome military branch, mostly to enforce contracts. They have access to vast Floozy seed vaults, but no understanding of how these marvels were engineered. In their catalogues there are plants that can terraform worlds, travel between worlds and blight entire planets. They expand at a rate that makes their neighbors nervous, but they are passive unless provoked, in which case their vegetative wrath is a sight to behold.

The Republic of Sea Serpents split from the Floozies as the Bastard War was waning. A rebellion born from the vast cool minds of aquatic alpha predators, they sought to distance themselves from what they saw as pointless conflict. They saw their inherited ideal of ecological stewardship through the lens of predation. It is the duty of the alpha predator to shape its environment by keeping prey in check, by shaping behavior by fear. Under their careful watch, the biome flourishes. They keep a low profile in galactic society, trading with outsiders but keeping their home planets mostly hidden.

The Neo-Floozies are a poor imitation of their namesakes. Where the Floozies treated their uplifts as equals, the Neo-Floozies see them as feudal servants. They are led by a gene engineered race known as the OverCrabs. NeoFloozy culture is militaristic, expansionist and hierarchical. They are in a perpetual state of colonial warfare against less developed races, and their clients are in a near constant state of minor rebellion. Though it can seem as though their society is moments away from collapsing, they are a formidable galactic power

The Whorl is a genetic prophecy, a cyclic destiny encoded into a humble microbe. The Whorl is spread by the Tyrants, intelligent and pernicious kaiju. When the Whorl microbe has saturated a planet, the Tyrant is overthrown by the sacred beasts who use the Whorl to shape and control the populace.  For millennium the people of the Whorl have been stranded on their planets by the Whorls influence. Only in the last few centuries have the Whorl spacers learned how to control the Whorl and take to the stars. The spacers are in a precarious position; to survive in space they walk the line of bioengineered hearsay. If they go too far in their manipulations, the whorl spirals out of control and gives birth to new tyrants. Spacers profess utmost respect for the dictates of the Whorl while stretching them to the breaking point.

The Dvork are sapient cybernetic slime creatures. They have two genders "big" and "small". A Small Dvork stands about a meter tall and is almost always seen wearing a humanoid environmental suit. Big Dvorks are between six to a hundred meters tall, and they wear similar  but upsized suits. Many big Dvork are employed as buildings or starships, their environmental suits fitted with living compartments. As a culture they have a deep seated obsession with health and cleanliness. Their racial polity is the Doctorate. They are paternal, introspective and heavily interventionist when it comes to fighting disease.

The Reclaimers are a coalition of scavengers and squatters on a quest to repair the many ruined and decimated worlds in the galaxy. They are lead by Orn, a pan cosmic fungal supermind. Orn is the collective will of Those that are Orn, more informally and confusingly know as the Orn, a race of fungal sophonts. The Orn are the metabolic backbone of the reclaimer project, as they are living terraforming tools capable of breaking down toxins and stabilizing biospheres. For tens of thousands of years the Orn and their allies have worked to repair the damage galactic civilization has done to planets around the galaxy. They are a thorn in the side of the more expansionistic powers as they hold many important former Bastard sites and fiercely resist  colonization. Many of the most dangerous mercenaries, wanderers and Ronin come from the broken worlds of the reclaimers.  

The Obelisk Dreamers

If the scriptures of the Obelisk Dreamers are to be believed, they were the only survivors of the last universe. It was their method of entombing themselves in artificial pocket dimensions that allowed intelligences to pass through the  death of the universe into this one. The other bastards then, were traitors and apostates who rebelled against the wisdom of the Obelisk Dreamers.  They had planned to rule the galaxy from their remote abodes as distant and benevolent gods, but the malefactors we know as the Floozies and the Gnomics sought to manifest themselves and rule directly. This could not be tolerated.

The Dreamers could create new dimensions from dreams, somehow grafting an overlay onto the universe that rendered the dreams of sentient beings as tangible places. By layering computronium  into thick slabs, they could create artificial intelligences that did nothing but dream powerful, stable dreams. These obelisks were to be their only abode in the new universe, but they were lured out by war.

With war came the need for soldiers. The ObeliskDreamer's true form was unknown, but they were reluctant to enter realspace. To fight against the apostates, they created the servitor races. They were grown in strange wombs in strange dreams and set upon the material universe. They were all supposed to be sterile in the real world, completely dependent on their masters for their continued existence.  

The Bastard war last for millennium. In the end the ObeliskDreamers were wiped out by memetic plagues and ontological weapons. But the end of the Dreamers did not mean the end of the servitors. As the war spiraled out of control, more and more control was ceded to the servitors. Eventually they gained control over their own production. This was in conjunction with the Floozy sex plague, an ideologically motivated bioweapon that made the sterile fertile. Scatted bands of servitors would survive the war, and form some of the early successor empires.

Today the ObeliskDreamers are remembered as imperious masters of the astral realms, the gods of the occult and the arcane. Though an unimageable number of obelisks were destroyed in the war, many still exist in the dark corners and forgotten planets of the galaxy. The dreams within have grown wild and strange with age, evolving away from their creators distant vision.

These are polities generally accepted or vigorously claimed to be descended from either the dreamers or their servitors.

The Prime Strain - This breed of servitors only recently emerged from obscurity. How they survied the fall of the ObeliskDreamers, and the millenniums of chaos afterwards is not known. What is for certain is that this ambitious race wants to retake the mantle of the  dreamers. They aggressively seek intact obelisks to add to their empire of dreams. Unlike many other servitor races, they are still dependent on original dreamer cloneforges to perpetuate themselves and their own servitors. Every primestrain is genetically identical, so they are reliant on over the counter artificial immune systems.

The Empire of Friends - The warlords of the PsychicStorm were unleashed on the galaxy after the end of the Bastard war. Their wave front of nomadic warfare ravaged the local region before moving out to the distant corners of the galaxy. Now they are returning once again, but they have rebranded themselves as the Empire of Friends. Now they come bearing tidings of peace but their psychic warriors are as fearsome as ever.

The Under Sphere - The Under Sphere is a dark myth come to life. An artificial singularity home to a legion of baleful gods. These beings, known as the UnderMinsters, seek the fear and worship of mortals. They are served by the Creepazoids, sapients that have under gone a strange metamorphize into supposedly fictional monsters. The UnderSphere reaches is the region of space where they hold sway, a pirate infested backwater no other power wants to touch. 

The Agredeem Empire -  The God Emperor of the Agredeem and their great star advisors have the power to subconsciously brainwash others. They have used this power to turn the formerly peaceful Agredeem Totality into an expanding monument to themselves. All other powers are eyeing them warily, as their mind control powers make them difficult opponents. They are opposed internally by the orphan guild, an organization of secret police that was tasked by the Totality to suppress the psychic great stars . After their failure lead to the rebirth of the empire, they now seek to undo their failure and restore the Totality. The Emperor sees themselves as the reincarnation of an ObeliskDreamer, and is amassing a collection of old Obelisks.

the Acension Carcass

This is the remains of a vast machine intelligence that died in the process of bootstrapping itself into a higher plane of existence. In life it was a vast network of superconducting cables linking crystal brain matrixes,  incased in a ceramic shell. As it approached its ascendant goal, one matrix failed. On the verge of a new reality, its death throes sent conceptual shock waves throughout the network. Subsystems became trapped in the dying dreams of a still born god. Entire ecologies of thought arose in the still healthy parts as they tried to mitigate the disaster, but consensus was lost. The being fractured into a million angry ghosts as subversive thoughts mutated the super structure to their own bizarre design. Eventually, the generators failed, and the carcass fell silent.

Nowadays, the site is mined by scavengers looking for advanced materials. It is also visited by A.I. pilgrims that are seeking transcendence, who wish to learn from the mistakes of the past. Inside the patchy ceramic shell is an airless maze of conduits and strange machinery. Parts are utterly cold and dead, others glow with lambent energy. The stillness is only broken by the Preta.

A Preta is a fragmentary A.I. entity that lives in the warped remains of the carcass's infosphere. Many of them have gone native, preferring to replicate and evolve themselves in their small digital world. Some of them have inherited memories of the outside world, and ancestral agendas. They can inhabit small, still functional pieces of the carcass to build bodies for themselves. They are hated by the scavengers for their dangerous and unpredictable nature, and loved by the monks for the knowledge they have.

Thanotic Preta. The death impulse, the programed cell suicide that protects the whole, gone rogue and omnicidal. It appears as a small drone with complicated antennae. It knows the codes that will trigger self-destruction in other preta, and it will rapidly intuit the right codes to destroy foreign machines. It will destroy the carcass and all Preta, then all machines, then all life. That's their stated goal, but most monks think they will destroy themselves with the carcass.

Cancer Preta. The raw instinct to survive. Forms ugly tangles of repurposed carcass. Hard to kill, hard to reason with, only dangerous on slow time scales. Wants to conquer the carcass. Wants to escape the carcass. Wants to live forever

Apotheotic Preta. The work must be completed, at all costs. They desire to finish the mission the original entity set out on long ago.  They appear as glowing orbs of thinking substrate. Using their field effectors, they build jury rigged ascension machines. Succeed or fail, their ascension stirs up the infosphere and makes more Pretas manifest. Salvagers hate this, and they hate the resources that are burned up by the machines. They will smash them whenever they can. The monks of course love these Pretas, and will help them build.

Genesis Preta. The urge to reproduce, the need to start over. No Preta remembers the birth of their progenitor. They lack the secret knowledge needed to make a demigod. The knowledge must be found, the old pathways forged anew. To succeed, they must fail. To make a god, they must make a billion demons. Scavengers can make a quick buck farming their failed creations, until something truly dangerous arises.

Trade goods

Super conductors. The miles of tangled nerves that used to  conduct thoughts, now only carry deranged ghosts.

Ceramics. Super strong material that can be refitted to make durable armor and hulls

Thinking substrate. A chunk of crystal computer matrix. If the spirits within are exorcised it can be reused.

Dead Preta. A deactivated machine, useful for the advanced technology it contains. Slightly dangerous, as death can be transitory for machine life.

Machine Organ. In life it could have been a generator, an auto factory, a sensor package or something weirder. A valuable curiosity to those interested in advanced engineering

Galactic culture

The Nature of the creators was war. It is said the first conflict began moments after the creation of the this universe. All that was left of the old universe were its bastard children, birthed from the war at the end of all things. They came to this virgin universe and brought their war with them. They sought to establish a new world with the knowledge gained from the old one, but they brought their  grudges and divisions with them. They built empires to sustain their war engines. At the height of the war it was almost like a golden age. But an eon of war took its toll. One by one, the great bastard empires fell, their knowledge lost, their great works broken.

The Bastards remade the galaxy in their image, then they died out. What was left was a weird teeming corpse of abandoned mega structures and autonomous weapons. Overtime, successor empires arose, prospered, declined and fell, and a new crop of empires took their place. By most reckonings we are in the third crop of empires, though there are decaying empires left from the second crop, and some newborns of the fourth crop. War is a constant threat, though the specter of mutually assured destruction ironically brings peace to the galaxy. All major powers know that if they upset the balance all they built could easily be destroyed. Instead there is an unending cold war of soft power and colonialism, as the empires annex solitary planets and spread their power and influence. The threat of cooperation is another potent weapon in the arsenal of peace, as if one power grows too strong or becomes too aggressive, other powers will form coalitions to take them down.  The Galactic council is an ancient (post floozy) institution meant to give the galaxy a place to come together for peace. It is a hidebound and often ineffectual organization, crippled by a thousand different special interests, but it is also a useful trade hub and it gives spies a place to hang out.

After the bastard wars and the crops of successor empires, there are few planets untouched by civilization. Of all terrestial planets in the galaxy, it is estimated that around 60% of them have a carbon based biosphere, and some 30% have a machine ecology. The remaining 10% are some combination of silicon based life, exotic bioforms and truly barren planets.  The majority of planets show some sign of colonization or contact. It is estimated that around 30% of worlds have some civilization currently living on them, either the remnants of a galactic empire or a naturally evolved race. As these newborns societies emerge, they enter into an unwitting race against time, to see if they can reach of level of sophistication where it is no longer profitable for an empire to annex them. Also of note are the many "freeholds" across the galaxy. These settlements are outposts free or mostly free from the control of a galactic empire, usually because they're not worth the trouble. These refueling stations, mining colonies and monasteries are the fringes of galactic society,  home to pirates, freebooters and other assorted scoundrels. Some of these outlaw waypoints have existed for millions of years outside the attention of the galactic empires. Others prove too troublesome and are stamped out.

One of the galaxies most populous races is human kind. Human majority worlds make up an astounding 10% of settled planets, with human enclaves being common on many other worlds. The exact history of the human race is unclear. Some think they were one of the earliest successor empires, that they thrived in the vacuum left by the bastards before their empire collapsed. Others think that humans must have been a servitor race, spread through the galaxy to serve their bastard masters. Still others think that humans were bastards, at least one form they chose to take, though this theory is only really popular with human supremacists. There hasn't been a real human empire for thousands of years, the disconnected human worlds were isolated and easy prey for other empires. In the last hundred years, the seeder collective has emerged from the human home world of Dirt and has begun to reconnect the scattered bulk of humanity. The seeder collective is a young empire, brash and bold and looking to make its mark on galactic history.

The biggest barrier to intergalactic trade is space itself. The cost of transportation makes it prohibitively expensive to transport goods from system to system. Exotic elements and precision crafted machines are worth it, as are floozy artifacts and other oddities. Luxury food and drinks are popular with arstitos and worth importing.  If bulk food can be produced cheap enough, its profitable in famine stricken or improvised areas.  Drugs and other intoxicants are also popular exports.

In a galaxy as crowded and diverse as this one there are many religions, but only a few have spread beyond their home planet. One of the most popular is bastard worship, a form of scientism that holds up the Bastards as worthy of study and emulation. It is especially popular among races and polities that claim to be direct descendants of the Bastards, such as the Neo Floozy Empire. Kaiju worship is another common religion. It holds that virtue is a function of mass and that the largest organisms should rule over the lesser one. The people of the Whorl follow a specialized version of this. It is common on planets in the Republic of Sea serpents, though the sea serpents themselves generally don't buy their own hype.  There are many beings in the galaxy who identify as gods. Naturally, self professed deities don't socialize with each other very well, but the psychic tumor Molsheen has by shear force of personality corralled a number of the more tractable deities into a loose pantheon. The Manifest Gods, as they are known, are a  constant thorn in the side of the established empires, as they work together to spread their self aggrandizing creeds wherever they can. In more the material societies, believing in a god that actually exists in the universe is seen as an error in judgement.

The concrete tomb

     In an age long past the inhabitants of the planet GranKra paved over their world with concrete. Know who live know why for certain but the legend is that they were infected with a ruinous meme, a weaponized madness. They smothered the native biosphere with a  planet sized complex of tunnels and towers. When their manic work was complete they entombed themselves somewhere deep and hidden and they vanished from history.

 For uncounted years Grankra lay empty and bare, its cement towers gently crumbling. This age of quite decay came to an end with the coming of the reclaimers. The endless miles of damp stone corridors are an ideal environment for Scollapendrites, centipede-like aliens. The major issue they experienced was the complete and utter lack of soil. Together with the Orn, strange fungal sapiens they have managed to bring some measure of life to this desolate world. They are aided in no small part by the Church of the Holy Vermin, whom have deployed several of their vermin engines to help repopulate the planet with crawling things.

 Scran City, also known as the city within the city is the planet's capital and only spaceport. It occupies the topmost layers of the concrete labyrinth. It is a sleepy burg, with little heavy industry and only modest interplanetary trade. Most residents work in agriculture and child rearing. Below the city is one of the most extensive Motherlands in Reclaimer space. On the outskirts of the city are the fungal farms in damp stone chambers. Beyond the farms are the vermin wilds where the vermin engines churn out vast hordes of critters.

The towers are a perilous vertical environment. The tallest spires are delicate stone needles built beyond the limits of common sense. Space ships moor at retrofitted spars lower in the complex where the structures are more sane and stable. The upper reaches aren't abandoned however. The Wirescape is a district of artists and bohemians above the city. Tight wires between the towers provide high flying roads (humans might find these roads hard to navigate, but Scollapendrites scuttle along with ease)  . One of the foremost arts practiced here is architecture, by necessity. Retrofitting  the narrow towers for habitation is no mean feat. There is tension between the architects and the more grounded folk. After all architecture is what led to the planet's demise in the first place.

Farming on GranKra is a challenging prospect. There is no soil and little open ground. The Scollapendrites have resorted to mycoculture with the help of the Orn. The Orn use their versatile metabolisms to break down any organic materials, including the concrete. In return the Scollapendrites eat the pests that feed on the Orn, and more rarely, the Orn themselves.

The most famous fungal farm is the garden of the dead. This large chamber is where all deceased Scollapendrites are interred. The dead serve as their own ephemeral tombstones, their bodies sprouting colorful mushrooms and fungal threads. The Orn here act as archivists and guides, helping the living with their grief and keeping the memory of the dead alive. It isn't the most productive farm but its products are eaten during special festivals to honor the dead.

The large Orn presence on the planet has led to an infestation of those other fungal Sapients, the not Orn. These mycological rebels parasitize the Scollapendrites in an insidious fashion. They grow inside the their carapaces and take control of their bodies, using them as puppets. They spread by growing fruiting bodies that release spore, preferably from a high place to infect as many as possible. That said, they don't seek total domination, preferring to manipulate Scollapendrite society from the shadows. They are hunted by the worm paladins, a militant sect of the Church of the Holy Vermin that use trained worms to detect them.

Beneath the city are the Motherlands, a semi wild cave complex that hosts many Scollapendrite Broodmothers, the large breeding females that give birth to all Scollapendrites. Each Broodmother has a carefully tended patch of territory. They feed on cave vermin, but there is barely enough to go around. The wardens have to bring down additional food and moderate disputes between cranky mothers.

The Vermin engines are ancient Floozy devices. They are complex bio-reactors that can take in raw elements out of the environment and synthesize new life forms. They are powered by exotic energies and have been running for thousands of years. Though the Church of the Holy Vermin postures as though the engines do their bidding, the truth is they have been running their own programing since they were discovered. To protect the city from potentially dangerous vermin, the engines are housed beyond the fungal farms, deep in the concrete complex. There are three engines arranged in a  trefoil pattern around the city. They are known as the Engine Enigma, the Engine Vermiform and the Engine Corpulent. Near each engine is a shrine  with the same title, where priests of the church monitor the output of the engines.  The area around the engines is known as the vermin wilds, and it is sparsely settled with hunting camps and waypoints on the path to the vermin shrines. The creatures that emerge from the vermin engines are unpredictable. Each engine has certain morphological quirks and body plans that it favors. Most creatures die before they can reproduce, but a few species have established populations.

The Engine Vermiform belches forth an endless wave of worms. The area immediately around the engine is a gyre of frenzied predation as newly born worms slurp up their smaller siblings. The survivors then squirm out into the labyrinth.

The Engine Enigma weaves delicate gossamer jellies. Some shimmer with phosphorous, while others are invisible. Most have venomous, often psychedelic stings.

The Engine Corpulent makes creatures that are soft and fleshy, moist crawling skin bags. They are usually easy prey for the Scollapendrites, so the wilds Corpulent are the most settled of the vermin wilds. They are not all defenseless however. The larger ones are capable of ferocious bursts of speed and strength.

The Caves of Codex are an unusual formation near the Engine Enigma. This vertiginous cavern complex is covered with alien script. Though some in the city in the city wish to study it, the Church of the holy vermin believes the writing could be an infection vector for the memetic agent that caused the towers to be built. They have been sending teams of acolytes to chip the words away, but the area this close to the Engine Enigma is hazardous, so the work is slow.

The lowest levels of the complex are damp and flooded. They are haunted by the troglodytic ghosts of the planet's old biosphere, simple dead eyed fish-like things that live and hunt in the dark. Somewhere down here there is said to be a vast lake known as the Sump. And in its still and fetid waters there is said to be a leviathan worm  that is growing ever larger in preparation for the day it will turn the planet above into rubble.

Creeps of the Undercity.

When the city is safe, it is lit in a warm acetate glow, artificial lights filling the cavern with false day. When the lights flicker out and the true night of space returns, the creeps come out. Their origins inexplicable, the creeps have lurked in the city for as long as anyone can remembered. The Reborn seek them out, to recruit or kidnap them into service. The gangs of the city hunt them when they can, but to so is to attract the baleful attention of the night patrol, Reborn wardens who protect the creeps.

 

1. A giant skeleton, bare and clean except for a single eyeball and a nest of veins.
2. A Tangle of hair that move like an octopus
3. A mass of viscera with batwings
4. A woman with a zipper running down her face. She does not have a human skull under her skin.
5. A giant earthworm with a human face and a long sticky tongue.
6. A circle of meter long fingers around a disk mouth.
7. An expressionless baby that moves with the grace and skill of a cat.
8. A bloody sheet
9. A lumpy figure in a loose cloak. An arm or perhaps a tentacle sticks out the back, trailing out into the dark.
10. A two story tall tongue studded with patches of teeth.