WayHall

Intergalactic Transit, The Veins of Ethnis

Written by Ademal

The Wayhall, the way, the hall, the line, the slip—whatever you wanna call it, it's serene, it's chaos. It's the most beautiful thing I've seen, and sometimes I feel like I am no more closer to understanding it now than I was the first time I rode it. Don't trust anybody who tells you they do understand it, because they're full of shit. There are a million theories, but the damn thing turns over some new detail all the time and breaks all the existing models.

The WayHall is the ever-growing web of WayPoints which define the borders of Ethnis. It links all of the worlds in an intergalactic freeway, allowing for mass transit and commerce. Without it the peoples of Pillar Spoke and Via Lactea would never have met and intergalactic travel may not have happened for thousands of years to come.

Even today experts struggle to understand how WayPoints work.

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Related Items

• Tower Spoke to Anchaemo Index

Anatomy

Index Keys

Indices are the keys to the WayHall. Each aligns with a WayHall and can be found on the world that the WayPoint is in the L3 LaGrange Point of. They are relatively small, only a quarter of a meter in diameter, considering the fact that the Rifts they lurk in are detectable only to the naked eye.

Finding a rift is the dream of any fortune-hunter with a ship. Banners will pay bounties large enough to terraform, settle, and govern a moon.

Finding an Index can set someone for life, or make it very short.

WayGates

WayPoints are massive constructs, rings approximately two-and-a-half kilometers in diameter. They tend to be found tidally-locked in Lagrangian points. They are artificial wormholes with different destinations depending on which side you enter the ring from. Example: if you enter the Via Lactea WayPoint from its solar radial you will travel to the Pillar Spoke WayPoint, and if you enter from the anti-radial side you will travel to the Andromeda WayPoint.

One side of a ring can be inactive while the other is active. If both sides of a WayPoint are inactive then the ring will be empty. When only one side is inactive the inactive side will be purely black, and a mysterious force will repel any vessel trying to enter it.

One side of a WayPoint is activated when you travel to it from another WayPoint. The other side is activated when you approach it with an Index.

The Way

Wayhalls draw ships towards their edges. That's "down" and you need to stay "afloat" to keep in the center of the stream, which then becomes prime real estate and a dangerous place to be. The Hall is broken into routes — where there is only one safe path, and lanes — when there's enough traffic to necessitate them.

Tech Clade

Unknown. The WayPoints appear to be Mecha Tech. Further analysis shorts out instruments used or returns garbage data.

Access

Moderate. You only need a starship to reach the WayPoints

Complexity

Extreme

Manufacturing

Unknown.

Aliases

• Bifröst
• The WayHall
• The WayPoints
• The Looking Glass

Scale

• 2.5km Diameter
• 100m Thickness

Important Instances

• Via Lactea WayPoint
• Pillar Spoke WayPoint
• Andromeda Waypoint

The Way

Enigmas

What made the WayHall?

Was it the Wheel or something else? The prismatic inner ring certainly lines up with the description of the Wheel, but maybe the Wheel was made by whatever made the WayHall.

What is at the end of the WayHall?

Are we being led somewhere? Is this all a test? Are we rebuilding the road of an ancient civilization? If the latter, why have we not found any ruins of their civilization?

What's through the black pool?

What would happen if you managed to push through the repelling force preventing you from entering the black pool on the inactive side of a WayPoint.