No Small Matter

To even powerful telescopes, Nocte Ventus resembles a shadowy limb, straining above the galactic plane, a smear hovering just over the civilized sectors. Those that live here talk of those “down below” as though it were a separate reality entirely, the political tides that wash over the rest of Republic never get high enough to reach this backwater. And nobody wants it to. Nocte Ventus is also known as the Andromeda Proxima Anomalous Zone. Ships, people, planets… disappear here. Maybe forever, maybe to appear where they aren’t expected. And sometimes, like the shore of a dark ocean, things wash up here that nobody’s ever seen before. Bizarre aliens, weird spatial-temporal phenomenon, physics fuckery. The reputation doesn’t keep folks away. Like detritus, all kinds of people wash up here. It turns out the galaxy really is too small for some, and the desperate, insane, curious and brave all wet their toes on these starry shores, the sandbar of the Milky Way.