The Great Empty

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• Planets And Spheres

"You will find deep space is anything but silent, and the Great Empty is anything but vacant." — Canari navigator

The Great Empty refers to the energy-based phenomena responsible for the creation and maintenance of spheres. Though often described as a “field”, the Great Empty is neither simple energy nor true emptiness as its name would imply. It is an active transformative force that surrounds, penetrates, and alters celestial bodies caught within its reach. It appeared during the event of the Convergence, but despite the best efforts of various scholars to study it, concrete information on the Great Empty remains sparse.

Overview

Pockets of the Great Empty are referred to as “energy fields” or “anomaly fields” depending on who you are speaking with. Star systems tend to house only one such field, and are often named after the name of the field itself. Habitable spheres are located near the borders of the energy fields, as spheres located deeper within each energy field are too hazardous to reach with current starfaring technologies.

Pockets of the Great Empty can contain other celestial bodies and objects that are not planets. This includes stars, asteroids, planetoids, space stations, and spacecraft. The light of a star struggles to breach the border of any given pocket of the Great Empty, meaning that once a star is consumed, the rest of that star’s system no longer benefits from its light. This also means that spheres inside of a given pocket of the Great Empty rely upon stars consumed by the energy field for light and warmth in addition to the general rules of magic that allow the spheres to function under fantastical, unrealistic rules.

Not all pockets of the Great Empty are tied to star systems. The ones anchored to a particular star system tend to remain extremely slow-moving, though they are amorphous in shape and shift in place. Otherwise, they drift endlessly in the cosmic sea, much like a lava lamp, or oil on water.

Relevant Energy Fields

Spheres within the same pocket of the Great Empty tend to exhibit similar traits. A list of relevant fields and their respective spheres is below.

The Echofield

The Echofield system contains the Eden Construct, Virilune, and the sphere Velora. It is named as such due to Velora being an ‘echo’ of its sister planet Virilune, carrying many of the same traits and even extremely similar landmasses. The Echofield's contained celestial bodies tend to serve as 'echoes' of other existing celestial bodies, imperfect copies.

The Arcadia

Arcadia is a pocket of the Great Empty that is responsible for the event that Lepterans and Carcids of Chitara describe as the Final Sunset. The field consumed the system’s star, allowing the fungus known as the Raid to rapidly prosper on the surface of Chitara and driving the native species there into a life below ground. However, some Chitarans of a now-extinct race were able to escape, taking refuge on a sphere within the field, Elyndra, and eventually becoming what is now referred to as the Nythera. Arcadia is characterized by fantastical development on the celestial bodies it contains.

The Deeptide

Some systems house a pocket of the Great Empty with no known spheres within it. Pelagia and Sauris are both planets, each residing in the same system as the Deeptide field. However, the Deeptide itself has no spheres near its border, leading many to believe that the field is simply empty, or perhaps only contains spheres near its center. It is named by the Thalassan explorers who charted the majority of its exterior.

The Unmoored

In contrast, some systems are nearly all spheres. With no other habitable planets in the system, Stratos and Singulon remain on the edge of the Unmoored field. Both exhibit abnormal gravitational anomalies, allowing Singulon’s central manufactured black hole and for Stratos’ floating cities. Gravitational anomalies are common on celestial bodies within the Unmoored field.

The Worldbridge

Named after its connective properties, the field surrounding Locus Astra is called the Worldbridge. This field remains relatively stable, and appears unique in its ability to reach out and form stable connections with other spheres adrift in the cosmic sea.

The Nullstorm

This is a particularly violent and dangerous energy field, believed to be surrounding the Nullstar itself. Out of all known pockets of the Great Empty, this one moves around the most, and has resisted with crushing force any serious attempts to get close to it or breach its outer border. As such, we know little about the Nullstorm.

Personal Accounts

What exactly happens to travelers in the Great Empty and what, if anything, inhabits it varies widely from different accounts. Below are a selection of interviews conducted by researcher Ruby Webber, compiled as a means of exemplifying the variety of strange and unusual happenings within these pockets of energy.

Interview 1: Dr. Elian Voss, Theoretical Cosmologist

WEBBER: Dr. Voss, for the record, how would you define the Great Empty?
VOSS:  Well, for starters, I wouldn’t.
W: Could you elaborate?
V: Definitions imply fundamental boundaries. The Great Empty resists labels in that way. Any time we attempt to classify it as one thing, it behaves as another. It’s almost laughable how it mocks the very attempt to study it.
W: Would you say it’s alive, then?
V: No… I wouldn’t go that far.
W: What is travel through it actually like?
V: Impossible to describe with clarity. Instruments fail. Crew members report events out of sequence. On our most recent expedition into Arcadia, one navigator claimed she saw herself entering a room several minutes before she decided to do so. Hull panels hum in sequences we can’t identify. Light and shadow invert.
W: So you have personally traveled through the Great Empty?
V: Just that one time, and I have no desire to repeat the experience.
W: So, your thoughts are…
V: It’s an energy anomaly. Until we further our means of studying it from a technological standpoint, we will gain very few answers from it.

Interview 2: Hale Merrick, Cargo hauler

WEBBER: You’ve spent more time crossing the Great Empty than most. Any advice?
MERRICK: Aye. Don’t whistle. You gotta unlearn the habit if you’re gonna cross through places like that.
W: Why is that?
M: Calls things.
W: What… kind of things?
M: If I knew what they were, I’d tell you. Listen here. If you hear footsteps on the top of your ship, don’t breathe.
W: Don’t breathe?
M: Not a little. Not all quiet like. Not ‘hold it in your cheeks’. Nothin’. Because if it hears you breathin’, it’ll know something’s inside.
W: That’s not very reassuring…
M: You want honesty or comfort? Can’t afford both.
W: Has it ever happened to you? The… the breathing thing.
M: Captain sneezed once. Something knocked. Ship itself knocked back.
W: The ship knocked?
M: That’s why I retired it. Can’t voyage on that vessel anymore.
W: So, you think the Great Empty is… haunted?
M: Haunted implies the dead, ma’am. I don’t think whatever’s in there was alive, at least not like us.

Interview 3: Junior Navigation Officer Tasmin Vale

WEBBER: So, how was your first trip through the Great Empty?
VALE: Terrible. Amazing, but terrible. I… I think I probably need new medication.
W: Can you describe what it was like?
V: The sky turns to so many colors. More than you could ever think of. The stars vanish, then appear, then vanish again. You look out the viewport and your mind starts inventing things to make sense of what you’re looking at. My crewmate says he saw numbers, our pilot saw his ex-wife.
W: Was she really there?
V: God, I hope not. She looked pissed.
W: Did you experience any anomalies directly?
V: Well, our ship is designed to handle brief stints into the Great Empty. Most crafts get ripped apart by the sheer force of all the energy in there. But it doesn’t mean strange things don’t happen. I got lost on the way to the kitchen.
W: That sounds minor.
V: For what felt like nine hours to me. The corridors just kept stretching and bleeding into each other… when I came to, I found myself back on the bridge holding a cup of tea, prepared how I like it. I didn’t remember making it. The others said that sort of thing is normal for the first few trips. It’s just… hard to adjust to.