“For the past two hundred years we have believed and officially claimed that there is no evidence for intelligent alien life within our galaxy.
That was false.
In the last twenty years there has been communication with an alien race whose nature will cease being a mystery before the end of this week.
The organization known as the Bureau of Extraterrestrial Affairs, our top secret organization whose existence and mode of operation is known by a few, has collected and spent the past two decades communicating with a society more advanced than our own. One that is now closer than ever.
Recently they have sent us a message.
“We are coming.”
The message told us.
We do not know their intentions or what they plan to do,
But I believe they will be peaceful.”
-January 1st, 2512; Edna Guis Confirming Contact Speech
Background
In the time leading to contact, from the moment humans landed on mars, the invention of the interstellar engine to the creation of the Grand Coalition and beyond, the was a question when in the interstellar age that found itself unresolved. That question was simple- is there intelligent life?
For despite what some theorists initially assumed in their wild delusions, intelligent alien life did not show up when humans used their FTL; rather what humans found was a vast expanse of lifeless worlds with the occasional planetoid endowed with odd alien critters on them. Never did humans find anything capable of the things humans were. It seemed that humans were the fluke among the cosmos, something that made sense- after all Earth existed for hundreds of millions of years with complex life.
It became hard for the denizens of the Grand Coalition to imagine sentient life in the galaxy outside earth, especially considering the advent of faster than light travel and how no other civilization seems to have beat humans to it. After all if they did, surely such force would have taken over the galaxy by now.
The people of the Grand Coalition accepted this “truth”, and went about merrily expanding and In the two hundred years before the 26th century, it would seem that the biggest enemy to mankind, was themselves.
In 2421, a civil war of cosmic proportions broke out between those loyal to the coalition and insurrectionists seeking independence, isolation and disunity in a vast, uncaring cold universe. The war was the first major interstellar war, from that war coming vast amounts of pointless dying. The interstellar war raged on for two decades, and is still in the mind of many citizens of the Grand Coalition as of 2512.
With the defeat of independence movements and the Coalition’s loosening of its control in order to appease its colonies and avoid another interstellar civil war it would only be a matter of two decades before humans picked back up the pace- expanding into the infinite frontier once more.
It seemed for some time that humans have finally conquered the cold, hostile cosmos. After all, humans learned to harness the weather, they learned to jump across the expanses of space and evaded self-extermination. Better yet, it seemed there was no other civilizations to compete or rival humans out there.
So it seemed.
In 2492, a shock came to the Grand Coalition in the form of a message on an outlying colony world known as Vestiva. A alien message, something thought unthinkable. Why didn’t these aliens contacting us only now not take over the entire galaxy? Are these aliens on the verge of doing so?
The following two decades saw to Vestiva becoming a world under strict watch by a organization known as the Bureau of Extraterrestrial Affairs, or BETA. BETA’s purpose was to assess the nature of the alien society nearing at hand and determine a very important question; do they threaten the existence of the human species, or are they about to open humans up to a galactic community of a scale far vaster than the two centuries of feverish expansion that has been human history up to this point?
Yet of course info got out, rumors spread- especially with the inexplicable military build up and boom in secret research facilities that soon followed afterwards.
But the Grand Coalition never officially said a word about the contact. It would be two decades later, in the year 2512 that the Grand Coalition would have Edna Guis, the secretly chosen representative for mankind announce that humans have contacted an alien intelligence, one presumably more advanced than us. One marching ever closer, with motives completely unknown.
As it turns out humans are not alone,
and that is horrifying.
Overview
Contact is a space opera RP that is character based, but you do not need to stick with one character. You can pretty much be whoever you want, from a civilian to a general, however the more authority and impact your character may have on the story, the more I expect you to play the RP. Your characters can die [in theory], and if they do, feel free to make a new one.
At the start the aliens will be controlled by me until later on, but the aliens for the most part can be used as NPCs provided they don't get treated as cannon fodder. The nature of the aliens will be kept mostly vague until shown off them in character.
You can't be a alien at the start.
Character Sheet
Name-
Appearance-
Biography-
Thingies- [anything they have]
[Optional] Affilations: [previous relations between characters, affiliations with an organization and so on].
Other-
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Guidelines
1. The common RP rules apply
2. I am not one to look for hyper realism, but please no psionics [isn't weather control and electrolasers enough?] and acknowledge that space is not a ocean [to the best of one's abilities].
3. The higher up a character you intend to be, the more commitment I want to that character.
4. You can make many characters while only having one character sheet.
5. If there's any questions you want to ask, like "is a shuttle spaceship that does X okay?", ask them. I'm pretty active when it comes to OOC interaction.
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Information Sheets
Here's a share of extended information people can read here if they want a better understanding of the setting.
History
Technology
Culture
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As for any potential questions about a map, I intentionally left much of the worlds blank so people can fill in such info in their character sheets. The only consistencies I care for concerning systems is that the inner systems are generally much more developed than the outer systems, outside of that feel free to make up star systems. Mapping I consider a lower priority for now and someone else could even make one even if it will likely be inaccurate just because space is 3D and a map showing space tends to be 2D.
