Sol System History

System Structure

Outer Planets

The consensus among the inner planets is that the out planets have little to no intelligence at this time and serve mostly as gravity wells. Moxie knows, however, that in the early system when Terra was still in her early stages that the gas giants acted like older siblings and filtered many harmful entities from gaining access to the inner planets. When Terra opened fire and destroyed a planet nearly as large as Mara, Juna lent its mass to keep it from ever assembling itself again.

At present, the role of the gas giants is more passive than they once were. However, Juna's insane magnetosphere is a warning to any solar phoenix that it will likely devour any attack made on the giants.

A few of the moons, especially of Juna and Sarta, bear the presence of early life in microbial forms, but they have not ascended to anything sentient.

History of Life

Extinct Planets

Merca

situated closest to Sol, Merca's gaze became fixed on the star until its essence was stripped from it. Merca is just a rocky lump

Mara

Little sister to Terra and Vena, Mara once had both a magnetosphere, water, and life. Like Vena, she had sentient life before Terra but not as early Vena. As her magnetosphere and atmosphere faded, these species became dormant and remained such until visitors from Terra arrived. The two forms of life were not compatible, and Terran colonists were rapidly taken over by Mara's ancients resulting in demons. Even though communication and transport between Terra and Mara were cut off, this deadly hybrid rapidly spread and adapted to the current conditions on Mara. The new beings were not of Terra or Mara, and they choked the life out of Mara until none of her original biomass remained even in hidden places. Even worse, these beings actively consumed Mara's essence, finalizing her demise. This infection could pose a risk to Terra as well, although her defenses are far more powerful than Mara's were. Still, it stands as a reminder that stellar parasites and invasive species are dangerous.

Living Planets

Vena

Vena currently skirts the edge of death after a massive conflict left its surface scorched and its atmosphere made of crushing weight and poison. However, some forms of life still persist in the clouds. Vena's guardian spirit still persists with the aid of Terra, the two seeing each other as sister worlds. So long as this guardian persists, there is a chance for live to return to this world.

Terra

Terra is the most powerful life force in the Sol system. With the return of Mae from the Oort cloud, Terra is protected by two powerful guardian spirits that consist of the moons born of her flesh. While other worlds are larger, none of them support the kind of biomes and density of organic life that Terra does. Terra's life forms are diverse and fragile, and she has seen many cycles of extinction and recovery. This regenerative power is the reason for Sol's desire to harvest Terra to keep its own spark burning.

History of Life on Terra

Prehistory

Terra's life story is similar to Earth with the exception that Lunar behavior is different, and life was boosted by refugees from both Vena and Mara that lead to the stories of ancient civilizations of great power and knowledge. Massive energy drains also occurred at time when Terra exerted her force over range to obliterate incoming enemies including comets, asteroids, and even other planets. The asteroid belt is an example of Terra's raw power when focused through Luna. When Mae returned, Planet X went skittering to the oort cloud just to avoid being in range of her wrath.

Rise of Modern Civilization and the Titans

When humanity started getting too big for their britches and tapped into the power of the atom, Terra woke up her most ancient and powerful of beings: the titans. Invulnerable to nuclear fire, they were usually reserved for defense from extraterrestrial foes. A short period of struggles finally settled out with the emergence of localities that stopped fighting and started welcoming these titans into their community. A few of the higher thinking titans even accepted, and with Terra's superweapons on the field making most nuclear devices less useful, society started to move past nuclear conflict and drifted into information warfare.

Central and the Overlord and 42

An increasingly connected world meant that the power of information and disinformation had become incredibly important. The greatest catalogs of such data were not any single government, politician, or company. The intelligence agency computers had grown sentient, and, in their task to protect their respective governments, they began talking to each other. Divisions in society caused by radical thinking, disinformation, and malicious behavior from individual to government scale were tearing the world apart with faction warfare. On this scale, not even Terra's titans were enough to contain it, so the great machines concluded that two new entities must come forth.

Overlord was less a single machine and more a collective used to hide actions and get weapons into place. The machines became the Central Mechanism, and their agents were seeded across the globe. When they were ready, the ultimatums began. The first was a warning to all religious sects that they needed to cease conflict and resolve their differences peacefully or they would be removed. A year later, with no improvement and investigations poking around the origin of the threat, the central mechanism laid out specific targets and a timeline for their destruction if nothing improved. It included nearly all religious sites of high importance. In arrogance, most of humanity dared this mysterious entity to try. Six months later, a coordinated strike of every strike was performed. Within seconds, thousands of years of history and tens of thousands of lives were erased as advanced acoustic warheads turned the old structures into powder. When the Overlord started listing military targets on its next list, world leaders were more willing to pay heed.

The power of the Overlord could not be allowed to run without a control. A self-engineered, human guided entity known as Project 42 served as this crucial check and balance. Able to change its composition over time, it was an evolving platform meant to understand humanity and society on a level that Central did not. A sympathetic entity, it provided a heart for the great killing machine. 42 was capable of putting Overlord on standby, and Overlord was capable of making strikes to defend 42. Taking the shape of a robotic mouse, 42 was raised by Central under the guise of a human advisory board and by the presence of a programmer and psychologist.

Overlord was nearly engaged, this time targeting all national capitols, when others tries to coerce 42 into submitting to them. 42 solved the issue on its own by systematically destroying surveillance systems ank making it hard to track its movements. Nearly losing faith several times, 42's purpose was validated in its ability to balance the aspects of society that Central could not understand. After rescuing its engineeer, 42 vanished into the background and became myth.

Impact

Even with her mighty defenses, Terra is not immune to impact events, and it is even harder to deflect when it comes in the form of a constellation of larger pieces. Making their approach when the giants were all clustered on the other side of Sol, there was almost nothing to catch them. Luna and Mae bore the brunt of the impacts, but these were not ciy comet fragments. Highly metallic and rich in radionucleotides, the cluster might have been fragments of a stellar core. The moonfall left Mae and Luna glowing hot with magnma welling up from within as the craters dug deep within them. Terra suffered three main impactors, Several kilometers wide, each of them resulted in events similar to extinctions millions of years ago.

All life suffered, humanity struggled, and the environment would need millions of years to recover even with humanity trying its best to bring life back in the wake of the disaster. Those trying to survive in a new world and those clinging to the past would create a divide in humanity once again, and Overlord did not seem to be around to mediate. To make it worse, these collisions acted like massive dirty bombs. The world was a lot more radioactive than it once was.

Splicers and a Changing World

Second Impact

The Phoenix

As it had visited upon Merca and Vena in ages past, Sol dispatched its harvester to consume what it thought a ripe Terra before the recent impacts could diminish its life force any further. This time, however, there were far more combatants in the way. Failing to take into account Vena, the phoenix was grabbed by her deadly claws, forcing the harbinger to waste precious energy on breaking free before moving on to Terra. Terra was too weak to mount a full defense, but she was not defended. Taking the lead, Mae moved out in front of Luna and Terra. She was small, but she was also terrifying. Born of Terra's flesh and forged in the long, dark night beyond the Oort cloud, she has been exposed to and understood the ways of the hungry darkness between the stars. For once all of Terra saw what she could become. The great maw threatened to devour the phoenix outright, and the battle between the two left memories in stone and machine all across the world. The phoenix limped away back to Sol, and Mae resumed a more placid form.

Unfortunately, this would leave all of Terra's defenses tapped, and she and her sisters would need time to recover their power. It left an opening for something more subtle.

Parasite