Northern Exclusion Zone
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The northern exclusion zone.
Click for a full-size image.

The Northern Exclusion Zone is an area in what would be the northern circle of the galaxy, assuming Earth was directly south of the center. While astronomically significant, it is mostly known for its behavior, being similar to Old Earth's Bermuda Triangle in that ships will mysteriously vanish. While the Bermuda Triangle was the result of people mistakenly recognizing a pattern that didn't exist, the NEZ is certainly an actual force to be reckoned with: over the course of galactic history, many tens of thousands of ships have gone missing from this area, and on two occasions, entire fleets vanished without a trace. As such, it is not an area that has been explored very well - at least, not until the discovery of Anomalous Materials, which the Zone has in extremely plentiful supply. While originally assumed they were created by an ancient, more intelligent species, naturally-occurring deposits in this region (even to the extent of entire lightly-anomalous planetoids) seem to indicate otherwise.

To the inhabitants of the Milky Way, the Northern Exclusion Zone is simply somewhere you Do Not Go unless you have a death wish. As a result, most Tartarus missions take place here - often on the outskirts, where mysterious phenomena occur less frequently.

This area is known for odd star formations, an abundance of dark nebulae, and abnormally high white dwarf counts, suggesting that a significantly higher number of supernovae occurred here than in the rest of the galaxy.

Effects of the Zone

A good way to imagine the Northern Exclusion Zone is like a big tank of water. Imagine a big tank of water - and now imagine someone has removed - instantaneously - huge portions of it. The remaining water sloshes around, creating whirlpools as it tries to repair itself and "flatten" the surface, and anything floating on the surface is likely to get sucked under. This is the state of the Northern Exclusion Zone. Sometimes you can cross the surface without coming across any swirling "eddies", and other times they're so strong they'll shatter your ship in the blink of an eye.

The NEZ is a barely-functional, shattered remnant of what it used to be, even down to screwing up spacetime and the laws of physics. It is quite common to come across sudden "physics storms" where things behave in a really "wrong" and generally destructive way. The strong nuclear force might suddenly turn off, or you could find yourself in a mire of time, or gravity might "forget" what it's supposed to do and electrocute you instead. It's not unheard of to find yourself staring at copies of yourself from alternate timelines, or even alternate universes. If you're lucky, you can see the storms coming from afar, and try to get out of the way - but if you're not, they might just happen to materialize right in front of you… or right under your feet.

The border of the NEZ, while vaguely defined, is not a "weird things past this point" line. It is merely a marker for "don't go beyond this point". Strange effects often happen nearby. Sometimes bad things happen outside the NEZ, although still in relatively close proximity.

Travel across the NEZ is possible, if incredibly risky. It is conceivably possible that you could traverse the entirety of the NEZ without encountering any untoward effects whatsoever - possible, if improbable. You and your ship might suddenly age twenty years for no apparent reason, or perhaps your ship (and you) will simply vaporize. It's a scary, dangerous place, and as a result, there are no long-term residents.

Shattered space

Main article: Shattered Space
There exist rare but particularly violent areas of the Zone known as Shattered Space. They are places where time and space have become so shattered that simply wandering near them can screw with you, and going inside can get you caught in time loops where you might see yourself doing something before you even do it. In such places, the flow of time is broken and no longer follows causality. Tales abound of gargantuan alien warships, locked in eternal battles within these breaches of spacetime, living out their last moments time and time again. These battles, conjectured to somehow be the core of these phenomena, are fought by alien ships that are completely unrecognizable. Video footage of these battles exists, but has been confiscated and is unavailable to the general public.

The appearance of Shattered Space is often likened to a broken mirror. You might see yourself reflected multiple times, or see a broken-mirror effect of whatever you're looking at. Rifts in spacetime mean reflections on nonexistent surfaces, and sometimes you can even see the back of your own head. Walking forwards can sometimes put you further backwards, and throwing an object forward doesn't mean it won't hit a rift and turn left or right relative to you - although to yourself, it is always flying straight. These "mirror effects" can slowly warp even as you watch them, appearing, disappearing, shifting, or fading in and out of view, merging with others and changing their angle of rotation through each other, melding and splitting. Watching it for a sustained period of time is enough to make a man go mad. Extended periods in shattered space, if you're lucky to survive that long, are often grounds for needing therapy for the rest of your life.

Being in the proximity of shattered space can have subtle, adverse effects to the chronological flow - a sort of warning to any that might venture near. Ships often report time missing from their logs. Ships traveling in a fleet may re-hear comm messages they've already received, or sometimes receive them before they are even sent. Shadows have been seen to lag behind the motions producing them, and crewmen have reported feeling full before they even sit down in the canteen. Feelings of "déjà vu" become much more pronounced, and are sometimes even repeated multiple times. Crewmen holding conversations might completely miss part of what the other interlocutors have said, yet be convinced they'd heard everything, and sometimes they briefly feel endowed with a vague sense of telepathic communication. Computer systems are hit even harder, often getting caught in loops, refusing to record data or recording it multiple times, or even crashing altogether.

The Tartarus briefly passed by one of these phenomena in the year 3094 during an exploratory attempt by the then-CEO of Tartarus Inc., Paren Larell; while the biological computers (HADES, SCAMPS, and CHIARA) were all unaffected apart from some "uneasy feelings", the electronic computers crashed and data had to be restored from backups. Anyone using the VR chambers at the time had their brain irreversibly scrambled, and the survivors had to be put down via airlock. Moreover, of all the platoons sent to investigate the phenomena, only two squads survived; their dropships had malfunctioned en-route and they had only just grazed the phenemena's boundaries, with the CASKETs unable to decouple. One squad (elite squad 253a) was recovered, but the other squad was mercy killed with a plasma battery barrage after two rescue attempts were swallowed up by the shattered space and lost.

Potential apocalyptic ripples

Effects of the distortions can, and have been, felt as far away as Old Earth, although physics events of this magnitude generally happen many decades apart. It's conceivable that the NEZ could create ripples powerful enough to damage things on the other side of the galaxy, and be felt across the universe - but it hasn't happened any time in recent history. The last records of such a phenomena are from the Plodii - an event that occurred shortly after their arrival in the Milky Way. Given recent scientific estimates, we're actually overdue the next such event - an event that we lack any safeguards or preventative measures for. The Quantums had methods to stabilize the galaxy's spacetime, but these have been lost and likely fallen into disrepair.

If such an event were to happen, it would be completely apocalyptic in nature. Some areas of the galaxy would be hit more strongly than others - in some places, there might only be a minor fluctuation in gravity, for instance, while in others the entire fabric of the universe might temporarily fail, erasing planets from existence. In extreme cases, it would be possible for entire civilizations to be erased from the timeline - past and present - to where half of everybody forgets they even existed.

Pre-galactic history

Fk4Bqy8.png "….Well doc, you could say that, yes. No bloody clue what it's supposed to be."
The following is Forbidden Knowledge: Almost no one within the REKT universe knows these things.
Player characters do not know any of it unless specifically told about it ingame.

The Northern Exclusion Zone was the site of the massive empire created by the Antecedents, although they're not the ones that really made it famous - that title goes to the Quantums, who even today aren't really known to the general public. The Antecedents held it for over a million years, and fought a dangerous multiuniversal enemy called the Chorps for over a hundred thousand years before the Quantums ever thought about showing up. The Antecedents discovered a way to create wormhole travel without even needing the help of anomalous materials, and basically had no need for Veloxium or warp travel. Unfortunately, wormhole travel messes with the envelope of the universe in a very recognizable way, and it attracted the Chorps - predatory multiform shapeshifting aliens that try to consume technology constructed by civilizations. Later, it attracted the Quantums, who were looking for hosts.

The Antecedents turned out to be pretty good at fighting off the Quantums - probably the only sentient species in the galaxy that had any ability to do so. However, this was early in the Quantum's experimentation, and their technology wasn't very powerful by comparison. In order to get the hosts they wanted, they intentionally weakened the outer boundary of the universe, letting the Chorps pour in and systematically decimate the Antecedent cities. When the Antecedents had been suitably brought to their knees, the Quantums swooped in and offered their assistance. The Antecedents accepted, and the Quantums taught them how to strengthen the boundary of the universe - but by that point it was just a little too late. The Antecedents' empire collapsed, slowly dying over the course of hundreds of thousands of years.

In the meantime, the Quantums began experimenting with the spacetime of our universe - ripping it apart, squishing it back together, bringing in huge chunks of other universes and ripping out sections of our universe altogether and transporting them elsewhere. Many stars and planets in the Northern Exclusion Zone are from other universes - and there are many instances of planet-sized monsters of either flesh or energy being contained within either stars or planetoids. This went on for hundreds of thousands of years, and when a Quantum irreparably destroyed one section of the spacetime of the Northern Exclusion Zone, they simply packed up and moved to a fresh spot.

Then, as though the Northern Exclusion Zone hadn't had enough, the Alt Wars happened - and the Quantums and Alts alike used the destruction and manipulation of spacetime as area denial tactics. Battles were fought that left permanent scars across the northern galaxy - some of them moving, some of them disappearing and reappearing. The Alt Wars were undoubtedly the single most destructive thing that happened at all, more or less ensuring and guaranteeing that there would never be any way for that section of the Universe to repair itself. In short, it's a nasty mess.