The Alliance, Itzillians and many members of the federation arrived in the original universe in what they estimated to be TMY -1,506,334, a new calendar was started which was given the designation AR(After Return). The Federation quickly began work on "Outposts", colossal space stations reaching over 37.5km in length and able to comfortably house millions. These space stations were placed around the first few star-systems "claimed" by the federation. The federation launched swarms of automated probes designed to detect any life and relay it's location back to a central hub in the federation's new home system. The probes reported the location and basic data about each and every system they visited. Not one contained life.
After some substantial database searching and impressive mathematics the federation eventually located Terra Maxima, Twill, Draco and Fraya. To their surprise they found them all to be lifeless rocks. They searched for many years but did not find any signs of life, intelligent or otherwise in this new universe. The federation began to look for suitable planets to settle but, unable to find any that did not require terraforming they decided to construct giant space stations, massive habitat rings, using "atmospheric shields" (the same technology as the alliance used in the hangers of star ships to keep air inside but allow ships to pass through) to keep an atmosphere in place on these stations. It was then that it became apparent that the federation were the race who had constructed the ring worlds that would later be settled by the Terrans. They had assumed that the ring builders, the Prioribus (meaning "first ones" in Terran), had been one race, but that was evidently not so.
There were a number of revelations that became apparent from this discovery. Firstly, they were alone in the universe, at least for the time being. Secondly, they had finally solved the mystery of why the Prioribus built ring worlds instead of settling on planets. But most importantly, the reason the for the Prioribus's disappearance all those years ago, before the birth of the Terran race, was about to become very important.
Life did not appear to be occurring naturally in the galaxy. A group of scientists, forbidden by the government and working in secret, prepared biological samples that could possibly, given enough time, evolve into complex life. Shortly after the last, and largest, ringworld was completed, the scientists, calling themselves Seminatores (meaning "sowers" in Terran) set out to seed life on as many worlds as they could. they reserved Terra Maxima, Draco, Twill and Fraya for last, in honour of their importance to the universe to come.
By the time microbial life started being found suddenly on worlds all through out the galaxy, the federation had dissolved into chaos. Separated only by ideology, two major factions appeared, taking on a familiar form. These two factions, calling themselves the Deus and the Haereticus, dissolved the federation into a civil war, sparked by the mysterious disappearance of one of the Seminatores.
The civil war, recorded as incipiens a novissimis temporibus ("war of the end times" in Terran) was long and bloody. Many of the outpost stations were destroyed, along with five ring worlds during the 357 year long conflict. The two remaining Illians sacrificed themselves to create the orbs that would create The Nine during the last few days of the war. It came to an abrupt end in AR 40,266 when a biological weapon was released into the shipping lanes. Nearly undetectable and with a very long incubation period followed by near instant death, it was silent but deadly. The bio-weapon was released in AR 40,265 and it's first victims began appearing nearly a year later. During the year long incubation the pathogen was highly infectious, and had spread to nearly every single member of the Prioribus.
By AR 40,267 only 132 souls remained alive. They lived out their lives as fully as they could aboard a single star ship, the Reliquiae. However, too afraid to dock to any remaining facility to repair the aging star ship, life support, propulsion and communications finally went dark on board in AR 40,302. The crew was not able to restore them in time, and the last 54 members of the Prioribus suffocated in their sleep.
And thus, to the dust from whence they came, they returned
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