The relatively small volume of human inhabitation is no lesser for its size. Inside this bubble there are man-made structures, wrapped around entire worlds, others so plentiful they shine like diamonds in the sky. Planets both with endless desert and frozen wastes, and ever stranger lifeforms within them, or none at all. Nations stretching centuries in history and incomprehensible scales in influence. Some forgotten by time, others still in recent memory, their ruins fought over by the survivors, and yet more thriving through a harsh universe. Wars both inconsequential and apocalyptic in scale.
People, more than any man could count, all with lives and histories of their own. Two standing at the apex of martial skill and prowess, ever rivalled by the other. A second-in-command very easily angered, a cruel, brutal warrior, an assassin with a mind shattered, and a man more machine than flesh. There's a king resplendent in his panoply, and a man stuck in the past of a vessel long-dead, a gunslinging, ambitious traitor, mechanical abominations that should never have been made, a long thought dead ruler, a strange collector of wildlife, one declared prophet by her people.
A long-retired veteran with a new life on the frontier, a brilliant scientist of the Core with a taste for combat, a grudge-bearing descendant of a people wronged, and of course, a certain nobody, from a backwater world, merely looking for excitement, unaware of the journey that awaits him.
Within the Orion Arm of the Milky Way galaxy, there is a region of space inhabited by a particular roughly 100-thousand year-old spacefaring sapient species. This is human space.
It is midway through the year 2876, in the Gregorian Calendar. Humanity has clawed its way onto the top of the billion-year corpse pile of evolution, discovered fire, agriculture, and civilization. Over the millenia, it has developed and progressed on its home planet of Earth, facing many a hardship and managing to overcome every single one. About nine hundred years ago, nearly six thousand years since the first civilizations appeared, humanity has reached the stars, and in the time since then, expanded to a space known as human space.
Human space is a bubble of human settlement about 340 light-years on average. It contains over half a million stars, and is home to roughly 72 trillion people, about 40% of whom are sapient synthetics, the common name for self-aware robots, androids and the like.
Within this bubble is a planet, some 320 light-years from Sol, and on it one Quaken Kelkener, a fairly unremarkable synthetic. This is the main story's protagonist. He, and four other people, the main gang and one Stringer, embark on a quest to rid the world of one Mad, Stringer's old acquaintance, with a storied history between the two.
There are two other stories planned as well, one focusing on the past between Stringer and Mad, and the other on what happens a time after the main story.
These stories will be 3d animated series, with animation remiscent of stop-motion and/or old Gmod animations of all things. It'll probably be uploaded on Youtube, whenever I manage to get something done, maybe by the time the story takes place.
Oh, and, read this:
Here's a map of human space, as well:
Human Space
Show map description
A entirely not comprehensive map of human space, featuring some minor, some major, and some miscallaneous locations.
Note: the way the map works is as follows; The hollow circle at the end of a big line denotes the position in the galactic plane, relative to Sol, where the vertical line itself shows how high or low it is relative to said plane.
