chapter 1 a thousand bad endings. a million lost souls. one broken warrior limps away after a thousand year rest.

In the Cosmic Era, twenty thousand years have passed since humanity has spread to every single corner of every single planet or rock floating in space miles and miles apart, but they are all connected by one thing that unites humanity to its true essence... and that is WAR. Mankind branched out into many species, from the major ethnic groups, splitting into many smaller groups. But the ones who mutated the most were the minority races of Earth who fled first from wars, genocides, and decades of persecution. They are the ones who fled to the stars because they had no home, no planet of their own. The Earth was no longer a place to call home. Earth's minority races were the most prone to mutation because of the longest exposure to alien compounds in space and because they were forced to inhabit undesirable planets, while the main races inhabited Earth-like planets that were happy and safe. Earth's minority races were forced to inhabit inhospitable places, transforming into a diverse range of peoples. The space peoples were called spacenoids. They had a war with the earth-spawn who persecuted them but they lost and fled farther into space some found homes on liveable worlds. They became stonepawns because they inhabited solid, rocky worlds like earth. Those who stayed in space were called star spawn because their home was the stars and asteroids, then the earth people expanded and pushed them farther into space. They were called earth-spawn and lived in colonies or pieces of earth flora that they brought with them to terraform alien worlds and mix them with alien plant life. they changed planets and the planets changed them in different ways than the spacenoids, as the earth-spawn changed the evolutionary path of their humanity, with this cycle of pushing the spacenoids farther and farther, the galaxies were colonized, leaving behind many kinds of humans. It was a global, intergalactic multi-cultural world to live in, full of conflicts, social tensions, and violence, but it was fertile ground for natural and social selection. But that was a long time ago. Humanity grew distant again, back from the last world war. the war of the 100,000. war number 1990 of that era. Amid the rubble of a long-lost battle and the wreckage of a thousand dead Zaku, now a reminder of the past. There was graffiti on the monument that proudly said and proclaimed that this was the day the war was over to end all wars. the final battle. it wasn't over at all. and the graffiti made fun of it, erasing the words that said "never again." with the words written in red paint on the side that said "again" and "again" and "again" and "again." for miles and miles. The young teenagers in their space rover were following the town tradition of mocking the veterans of the past. Yes, it had been the youth culture to mock their ancestors who had fought and died for them, labeling them as fascists, bigots, and closed-minded, even though they had done it all for them and their future, the victors. The teenagers mocked and looked in their space suits at the location of the weapons of war. The Zaku, a giant mecha, a robotic war machine. they painted blasphemous pictures on the graves of soldiers in space. their souls would never find peace with what they wrote on each of them. the city had been doing this for generations. it was commonplace in the global space-age culture of villagers to mock the historical monuments of the past. Romo- Hey? I think we're out of paint Yoko. Yoko- oh what? Not again! I thought we bought the extra-large one! That Indian guy at 7 eleven ripped us off again! Tomo- We should pray to Yama that his bad karma gets the better of him! And that something bad happens to his store. They both laughed at the thought of him getting hit by a meteorite and vaporizing into red hot ashes.

the two of them were punks in space suits, with white jumpsuits full of stickers and trinkets, black shoulder pads, and red jet backpacks with yellow oxygen pumps. each of them had a cute cat-eared helmet with a mask of sharp, angry metal teeth underneath. They were troublemakers. 90s punk kids in neon-striped jumpsuits in the darkness of space, who enjoyed looting the bits of trash and metal debris from the battlefield. Tomo- well, I don't see the point in staying here anymore. we might get caught in a space tornado or an electrical storm. or a ghost ship might find us! ooooh, scary Yoko- shut up! Ghost ships don't exist. they're just a myth. mechs coming back from the dead as revenants with zombie ghost pilots inside controlled by duplicates of the pilots' consciousness in the computer ai after decades of recharging in cosmic dark energy! it's just scientific bullshit. Tomo- I don't know. when you say it like that, I think it's too specific to be just a conspiracy theory. Yoko- You need to stop going on those message boards. and jump on the VR chat like the rest of us.