[quote=@knighthawk] [@Stern Algorithm] Horizon: I've never mentioned what alien race is in his future, it would not surprise me that the Jarav came once before, planted 'seeds' and came back in the year 3000 to harvest the fruits of those seeds planted thousands of years ago... I LIKE IT! That also means that horizon and interference use the same tech as bootstrap. I think it would be awesome as hell if the three were immune to each other's tech. Thousands of years ago it could have been a way to prevent friendly fire from hurting allies in great battles by all their tech harmonizing to similar frequencies. Ark: Remember that episode of futurama where fry eats the egg salad sandwich and the worms inside make him a peak physical specimen? [/quote] Sorry, I remembered incorrectly that Betsy was a dwarf alien from another planet instead of a human from the future. But I think it would make some sort of ironic sense if Dr. Fang unearthed an ancient Jarav relic and used it's tech for herself and Horizon, while that same alien race comes back in the far future, and contributes to Bootstrap's tech. It would also mean that Horizon's 'story' about being a benevolent creation of the Jarav may not hold water. Also, I really need to watch Futurama. I haven't seen that episode but it already sounds hilarious. The idea for Ark is an old idea I had which I never used. If anyone's curious, here is the entire backstory of the Bresleen: [hider=The Full Bresleen Backstory] The Bresleen evolved and gained sentience in a warm, soft, hairy environment. They populated and spread along the surface, the land was rich with resources and teeming with life, though frequent catastrophic movements often destabilized everything. Their worlds were always unstable and always died within a few generations. Their only hope was that whenever another world approached and ‘scratched’ theirs, they would send their bravest and strongest youths to ‘jump the scratch’, that is, grab the hairs of the other world as it brushed against their own and then climb the hairs towards their new world. Their ancient religious texts said that they had been ‘jumping the scratch’ since time immemorial, that they had been nomadic and it was only in recent history that they have not had to do that. Their worlds started living longer, their colonies could likewise last longer and develop more. Then they developed technology, they started farming, mining, and chopping down the hairs to fuel their industries. They dug under the surface and lived there to avoid the catastrophic effect of the ‘scratchings’. They learned how to choose living areas that avoided the leylines (nerves) and underground rivers (blood vessels) that streamed everywhere. Hitting a leyline was a certain way to incur a ‘scratching’. But still, their worlds would die, and they would have to evacuate as many as they could before that happened. Now they had specialized pods that could carry many people and much freight, that were specially designed to catch a ‘scratching’ and be carried away. Then they discovered radio. With it, new colonies and old colonies could communicate though it was heart-wrenching to hear the voices of those who had remained on a dying world. Still, they were brave and resigned themselves to their fate, after all, this was the glory of their ancestors, to travel from dying world to dying world. But they knew that many, many colonies had started before the invention of radio, and there developed a motivation to bring all members of their kind into communication. Because every once in a while, a group of ‘jumpers’ would find a new world already pre-settled by other jumpers, the two groups having somehow converged on the same world by chance. And they would find that the generations of isolation that separated them allowed the development of unique and wonderful cultures. But one day, the unspeakable happened. Miners dug too deep and prematurely killed their world. This abomination was broadcast to all other colonies urging them not to repeat their mistake. But they had become decadent, and took from their worlds with abandon, they didn’t think it mattered, since the worlds would die anyways. They continued to drill, and as their industries flourished, they felled more hairs, and pumped their pollutants into the red underground rivers. More and more worlds started dying prematurely, and the Bresleen noticed that when a world died prematurely, there were no ‘scratchings’, they couldn’t evacuate and they died with their world. Then the abductors came, huge cold orifices that hovered over their cities and with powerful winds abducted their population. Huge demonic alien shovels came down and gouged out their underground dwellings. Then came the poisonous floods, acids that ate away at their infrastructure and leaked into their homes, killing them on contact. As they kept in constant radio communication with each other, their religious leaders started preaching that they go back to the ways of old and to respect the worlds, in this way would they avoid the wrath that befell them. Until the worlds spoke back to them through radio. [hr] It was after the worst years of the “Balding Plague” that the great biochemist Garthwrar Froog first noticed that the first sign after contamination with the plague was the emission of radio signals. One day, while monitoring a patient, on a whim, he tuned his radio detector to the frequency being broadcast by his patient and saw a pattern, a signal that wasn’t just noise. He changed the output from visual to audio and heard a strange unearthly chatter. Then he found a two-way receiver and called back, noticing that the chatter immediately went silent. It resumed and he spoke again, and it went silent again. That’s when he got the linguists to come, and that was how the sentient Etraaf discovered their neighbors, the microbial parasitic sentient Bresleen. It was unprecedented, the Etraaf have often wondered about intelligent life beyond their planet, yet they have found one right under their noses. The Etraaf were able to very quickly establish the fact that the Bresleen knew nothing of the sentience of the worlds upon which they lived, which were the Etraaf themselves, and both sides were incredibly apologetic to the other, the Bresleen for causing the ‘Balding Plague’ which typically started with patches of hair disappearing as the Bresleen initiated deforestation, black areas of the skin, where their underground cities flourished, itching when they dug too deeply, blood poisoning from the pollutants, often followed by sudden catastrophic death when they mined into and disrupted a vital organ. The Etraaf apologized for their regime of disease eradication, they knew the disease was caused by some skin bound microbe and was spread by touch and so quarantined infected patients which prevented the Bresleen from evacuating to a non-dying world, the Etraaf then tried first to vacuum away fur lice and other parasites, then they tried to excise the blackened tissue, and they finally applied a caustic body wash that was much stronger than conventional soaps. And the Etraaf noticed that since they began their disease eradication program, the mortality rate of the infected decreased considerably, the Bresleen explained that they had made steps to be more environment-friendly to their worlds since they thought that their gods were punishing them for their greed and hubris. And here, here was the great turning point. The Etraaf did not set themselves up as gods to the Bresleen though they easily could have. They instead extended an equitable hand of mutual understanding, that they would be peers, two sentient races living on the same planet, occupying the same space, the Bresleen living on the Etraaf. They would take care of each other, the Etraaf noticed that some strains of Bresleen were in fact very beneficial to skin health. The Bresleen explained that those were not different strains, merely different cultures with different societies and habits, and that some treated their world with more respect and reverence. They became symbionts one of the other, the Etraaf offering their bodies as living space and resource allowing the Bresleen civilization to thrive unhindered, the Bresleen took special care to avoid harming their hosts, and maintained their health as best they could. The Bresleen started by domesticating the Etraafa Fur Lice, a constant annoyance to the large, furry, six-legged Etraaf. They shared technological advancements, and Etraafa nanoengineering made leaps and bounds due to study of Bresleen technology. The Etraaf also helped the Bresleen establish radio contact with all wayward Bresleen tribes, fulfilling one of the Bresleen’s ages-old cultural dreams. Eventually the Bresleen also discovered a means of transporting themselves from one Etraaf body to another, in a manner akin to space travel, further uniting their society. It also allowed them to start forming colonies on non-Etraaf, Etraaf livestock which they sequestered specifically for Bresleen use, in the manner that spacefaring races would mine and extract from asteroids or gas planets for resources. The Bresleen were advancing much faster than the Etraaf, living on their bodies, the Bresleen learned more about Etraaf biology than did the Etraaf, and all Etraaf achievements and technologies came about as an attempt to scale-up what the Bresleen had already accomplished. And after a few centuries of symbiosis, the Etraaf were no longer furry. Once they reached adulthood, they were completely shaven and their bodies were covered entirely by the black plating of the Bresleen subcutaneous megacity. The megacity served the Etraaf as protection, and their deep access to nerves and blood vessels allowed them to monitor the Etraaf bodies constantly and to respond straightaway to avoid any complications of health. The Bresleen had in fact become something of an intelligent immune system for the Etraaf. And the greatest of all achievements finally occurred. A dedicated Bresleen drilling team at the base of the Etraaf skull, carefully mined into the Etraaf brain, and in diving submersibles went around attaching sensors and electrodes everywhere in the Etraaf brain to establish a communicating link between the governing council of the Bresleen megacity infrastructure and the mind of the Etraaf. With the link, the Etraaf could think directly to their Bresleen without the use of two-way radio, they suddenly knew more about their own body than they ever thought possible, and could even ask for the Bresleen to help them trigger peak physical performance, since the Bresleen now had access to their blood, nerves, brain, and soon all other vital organs. The societies of the Bresleen and the bodies of the Etraaf became fully intertwined, and the Etraaf could even think into the Bresleen Radio Control to communicate, more or less, telepathically with another Etraaf. The Etraaf became a unified communal race of mutual empathy, education was no longer a problem, nor was the fair distribution of resources. It also became much easier for the Bresleen to communicate their scientific concepts to the Etraaf, and for the Etraaf to explain the constraints of scale-up so the Bresleen engineers could be employed to help the Etraaf design their own technology. And very soon, the Etraaf achieved space travel. a century after that, spacefolding. Anything the Bresleen developed, the Etraaf scaled up for their own use, anything the Etraaf developed, the Bresleen miniaturized and installed into their megacities, the Etraaf themselves. So depending on the Etraaf needs, some megacities were installed with military grade force fields, others with convenient cutting lasers in the fingertips, some even whimsically built a mini-spacefold engine placed right under the heart by which that particular Etraaf could teleport. The two races soon came into contact with the Galactic Council, which was on the brink of civil war. When violence ventually erupted, the Etraaf joined the fray, and proved themselves to be overwhelmingly powerful. Their stations, ships, bases, weapons and a myriad other devices were constructed with incredible efficiency due to their background in scale-up and scale-down, all their materials were top quality since they were manufactured and refined from the nano-scale up. The Bresleen modified their megacities (the Etraaf) to become battlestations, effectively transforming the Etraaf bodies into war machines. The interplay of the Etraafa and Breslee political systems, command structures, and management strategies as well as their radio-telepathic network, gave them a tremendous advantage in their ability to control, command, communicate and handle logistics. Each Etraaf was a city, a handful of Etraaf was a nation, a group was a planets-worth of Bresleen. But the worst thing the Etraaf could do, was to visit the Balding Plague upon their enemies, because after years of technological evolution, the Bresleen knew how to power their industries and collect resources in an environmentally-friendly and renewable manner. They knew how, but only out of necessity and respect for their brothers, the Etraaf; for their enemies, it was a completely different matter. And having experimented by mining from many non-sentient lifeforms, the Bresleen also knew how to extract every bit of usable resource efficiently with absolutely no regard for the host organism. The Bresleen still tell their young with a mix of pride and repentance, how many alien races were rendered extinct, how many homeworlds were left with nothing but a population of dead blackened husks, how extracted resources were shipped back to fuel the Etraafa-Breslee war machine so that they could continue to build so that they could continue to destroy. However, their side lost, and the reforemd Galactic Council reviewed the entire war, stressing again and again how the Etraafa-Breslee Dominion had committed numerous counts of mass genocide against their enemies, labeling the Bresleen as an ‘odious form of biological weaponry’. The other alien races only saw the Etraaf as a sentient race, the concept of a microscopic sentient civilization living on the skin of the Etraaf was difficult for them to take seriously. Etraaf who were not slain were abducted for 'decontamination', a nano-surgical process that stripped their bodies clean of all traces of Bresleen civilization, leaving them weak, unprotected, and hauntingly alone. Many Bresleen nations chose to evacuate from their host Etraaf to save themselves a horrible death by decontamination, and to save the Etraaf from the humiliation of the process. Yet even these Bresleen refugees were hunted down and exterminated. The Etraaf were now naked and hairless, prone to disease, unable to communicate through radio-transmitted pseudo-telepathy, unable to have a constant companion in the form of an entire nation of Bresleen. They huddled together, their way of life for generations had been stripped away in a few years, a protective presence that had been a part of their civilization for so long was gone. The Bresleen were like their brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, children, best friends. And the Bresleen, in fist-sized football-shaped arks, evacuated; most were destroyed, and the rest... [/hider] I need [@Pumpkinlord]'s approval for these characters (unless your approval as Co-GM counts, [@knighthawk]) especially Ark, since I'm basically dictating the existence of a galactic council and galactic civil war.