Planet SwRm: Home of Maroon Island VILLAINS, The SwRm!
Planet SwRm is the nearest planet to Earth with intelligent life, a mere 100 light-years away.
Planet SwRm: Hell on High
It is an awful place to live. Billions of years ago, when it's solar system was still forming, the young planetoid was knocked from it's natural orbit by an apocalyptic collision with another still forming, but smaller planet. The impact obliterated the smaller planet and sent Planet SwRm reeling into its current position creating its hostile ecosystem.
It's a planet of howling extremes, one side permanent day and the other total night. Its "south" half is now locked eastward toward the sun it circles. Its "northern" half is strangled by darkness, constant subfeezing temperatures and relentless storms. The planet now spins perpendicular to the sun along it's east west axis.
Planet SwRm: Endless Night, Endless Day
The Ring of Life is what residents call the central ring of Planet SwRm, the only habitable zone. The Sun can always be seen on the horizon, bathing the Ring in gentle light. Vegetation and drinkable water can be found here and as ice melts from the frozen zone, rivers form all along the Ring, flowing eventually to the edge of the desert.
Towards the Sun lies endless desert. If, somehow, you make it to the Eastern Pole, the closest place to the sun, you will find magma forcing it's way to the surface from the internal magma core. These massive volcanoes riddle the Eastern Pole and blanket it in a shroud of sullen gray clouds of pumice and ash.
Adventurers heading away from the Sun find icy mountains and ice sheets beyond. Similar to the Eastern Pole, the Western Pole is saturated with volcanoes, ice volcanoes. These massive volcanoes spew magma and water which instantly freezes in the harsh conditions of the Pole. These ejections spew condensed water into the atmosphere which comes down as snow in the Frozen Zone and rain in the Ring of Life. The magma comes quickly back down as huge hails of rock which cause the volcanoes to grow.
Even on this frozen desert ball of hell, life found a foothold in the limpid warm pools of the habitable zone. Over billions of years life reinvented itself a thousand thousand times until, from nearly nothingness, creatures who strode on two feet emerged. For millennia they fought the greedy encroaching desert on one side and the fearful dark and cold on the other. And they fought each other in endless wars of conquest, revenge and greed, long bitter battles lusting for every last inch of precious arable land. The victors swarmed like locusts over the the conquered, consuming everything they needed to grow stronger, taming the edges of the desert and the grip of ice, expanding into the uninhabitable, shielding themselves from the constant sun and the constant dark in underground cities that defied the punishing light and the icy gloom. Soon they took to riding the hot thermals that rose in waves above the ocean of sand and one day found themselves ready for the stars.
Planet SwRm had reached its Master Phase, the rhythms of their unnatural world ground down by the iron boot of commerce as the evolved beings learned to master their planet. The constant day and night no longer mattered, the “seasons” became just another inconvenience to be shrugged off by what was best for the rulers of Planet SwRm, a small group of scientists who run the planet as an ongoing experiment. They learn to create any fanciful luxury the people of Planet SwRm demand. Over millennia, the cabal of Rogue Scientists have divided Planet SwRm up among themselves and rule in privileged isolation from their fiefdoms, extracting the planet's wealth from the tortured broiling eastern desert, and the western sea of ice..
The Leader of the scientists decides to embark on the ultimate experiment, focusing the planet's resources on one goal - extending life indefinitely for himself, his fellow Rogue Scientists and any who dare to follow them. They spread their dogma in quasi-religious manner promising those who follow them the final subjugation of Planet SwRm and then other inhabitable worlds - conquering space, by prolonging life indefinitely through artificial transfer of consciousness and induced hyperbaric sleep - to leap the hurdle of time. The pursuit of that goal means a complete re-ordering of society as it requires the total re-direction of every level of science and industry to produce and create the systems and sciences needed to achieve this grandiose paradigm. Old age or serious injury does not mean the end, you can be reborn on another world...... where new bodies are available for The Joining... now and forever.
The insane theocracy cannot hold. The populace rises up in rebellion against their Leaders (as in the French Revolution on earth, which is a near equivalent to what happened on Planet SwRm ). The wars last for decades during which time the scientists continue to work on their grand design. The Wars of Revival end when one of the Scientists switches sides, recognizing the scheme for the plunge into madness that it is.
The Losers of the war are rounded up and given no choice. they must be exiled in space and take their dangerous technology with them. Traveling at 1/10 the speed of light they start the 1000 year journey to earth, the nearest habitable planet where they plan to reincarnate themselves. They drop out of subspace 10,000 years ago but the scattered populace of earth isn't advanced enough. The human brain is still evolving and The Joining would cause it to crash. In spirit-like fashion The SwRm begin to interfere with events on earth, inducing calamities, fomenting wars, increasing knowledge, culling the population to create a human more capable of withstanding The Joining. Now it's 2019. The human brain has reached Equivalence. But the ancient systems of The SwRm begin to fail and they cannot awaken their sleeping cohorts. They make their move, kidnapping The Maroons to help them find the Knowledge of Immortality and other Secrets they believe were scattered through the universe at the beginning of time and are hidden in The Book of Skulls and other books and artifacts. They portray themselves to their captives as omnipotent god-like creatures. They have plans for Earth.