Beyond the Stars Prologue Man has always wondered, dreamed, desired to explore the vastness of the void. Thousands of years peering into darkness, trying, often in vain, to pierce the fog. Discoveries were made, slowly. The telescope, models of the Solar System, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto. Then, on July 20, 1969, a man stepped onto the moon. Probes were sent to the near and far reaches of our Solar System, and discovered much more. But still questions remained: are we alone? What is out there? Is there another Earth? Will we ever know? On a cold winter morning in the year 2063, the last question was answered. It was known everywhere in minutes: Voyager V had pierced the Kuiper Belt! Everywhere was there ecstasy as humanity realized that answers to those long-standing questions that had been asked for millenia were finally within reach! By 2100, the nearest 5 solar systems to ours had been explored. By 2125, technology had been developed to create an atmosphere for planets! By the year 2180, solar systems S-2 and S-4 each contained 2 colonized planets, and other solar systems were undergoing transformation! It seemed that there was no end to what humans could achieve! Great leviathan ships that could fit towns and cities could soon be seen traversing the distances between the colonized systems: S-1, the Earth-system; S-2, filled with industry; S-3 of intersolar government; S-4, the mining system; S-5; S-6; and S-7. Humanity had put aside its differences in the name of the Grand Enterprise: exploration of the stars. Our race was experiencing a golden age the likes of which had never even been conceived of before! Poverty was all but eradicated, and most lived in luxury. However, something was awoken. Something was disturbed in humanity's blind rush forward, something that should have been left dormant forever. It was intersolar standard month 5, day 13, intersolar standard year 2293. While exploring the planet Umbria on S-8, explorers were attacked by... something. They were not human, not animal nor plant, nay, they were not even material beings. They seemed to be shadows, ignored by the crew until they began to suck the essence from one of the members of the crew. Then they fought, but they, too, were absorbed by the things. Then, those horrible abominations changed. They took on the forms of the team, and then they assimilated the equipment and vehicles. They stole our technology from us, they changed it. Then… they used it on us. They came in a swarm, and it was all we could do to hold them off. S-5 and S-7 fell. Humanity’s forces were worn thin, but we WOULD defeat this menace. We had overcome all challenges before, and we would once more! New starships were designed at breakneck speed and put into action. Citizens did all they could to help, and we drew from our population, which was by then enormous at over 50 Billion strong. We are now at the present. The outcome of the war is ours to decide. Will we give in, or will we fight until every one of them is eradicated? The choice is ours and yours!
Jesus Fahking Christ. This 5 paragraph story is better than a three-month project that my classmate presented. You outline humanity's evolutuion to the stars, and the massive success that we find. Certain systems have certain purposes! GENUIS! I tip my hat to you, MasterofZerg, one badass author of galactic conquest. You deserve a lot of veiws and likes for this, and I sincerely hope that you get these. With more than neccessary respect, TehLonelyDonut
Wow! Thank you for your praise! Also, are there any flaws that you can see, and do you want to play a character as outlined under the story?
Holy Fahking YES! I would love a character in this. Short Description: Name: Joey Miles. Behavior: Wise-ass, throws himself into fire to draw it away, smart. Interaction with others: knows everything about everything, doesn't hesistate to speak his mind, tough love (Ex: Guy blows up valuable intel, Miles' Response: Well, you kinda screwed things up) Errors: A few too many commas. I would love him to be in this, and thanks for asking! BTW: I still want those slaves from NeKoNeKo.
Perhaps he should not know everything about everything, but instead think he does. Other than that, seems good!
Here is the next chapter of Beyond the Stars! Enjoy! Also, I am sorry, but I am going to have to discontinue the roleplay option in the first post for technical reasons. Have a nice day! Chapter 1 Blast! Carl thought as he narrowly avoided be smashed by the jagged shrapnel from Johnson’s sentry. These hunks of metal were just too slow! The Umbrians, as the shadow-morphs had come to be called, had somehow altered the engines of human sentry fighters to be more powerful. Now the forces of humanity struggled to bring their technology on par with that of the aliens. The humans had names for all of the Umbrians’ altered technologies. The warped sentries were spiders, small and black, but incredibly agile. Thunderhawk bombers became shredders, their heavy ordnances clouded with an inky, all-consuming blackness. Judicators were corrupted and became serpents: dark, long, and deadly. All that those horrible things saw, they consumed. And humanity was next on the menu. “Dan! Jim! Cover me!” Carl shouted into his communicator. “The rest of you, follow behind!” Then, “This is SL-15 to the Eris! Send dropships to attack with us! We’re takin’ down the big one!” Static, and then: “Roger that, SL-15. Seven Dropships heading out with you. Keep ‘em safe.” Carl and his men maneuvered through the frenzied carnage to the Eris, their home ship. There, they rendezvoused with the dropships and sped off toward the Umbrian flagship. It was a grotesque behemoth floating there among the stars. It was black as night, but there were red streaks and smears running along the hull, simulating blood. On its side were inscribed several strange runes. The glyphs seemed to be a sort of language, but command had yet to translate it. Carl simply called the ship The Stain. Occasionally, little puffs of light would bloom around it as a sentry or thunderhawk drew too close. Let’s hope I’m not one of those puffs, Carl thought. “Sir!” Dan’s voice crackled. “We’ve got five spiders coming in at ten o’ clock!” “Alright, let’s take ‘em!” shouted Carl, pivoting his sentry around to face the foes. Flying towards the sentries, Carl thought of the few times he had seen an Umbrian up close. They had looked so… human. He could visualize the enemy pilots’ faces, ones that could have belonged to any human. He had been told by his superiors that the Umbrians stole the life from humans and left their husks to wither away. But he simply couldn’t get over the faces; it seemed so wrong to fight other men! That hadn’t happened in centuries! The two groups of fighters clashed with a flurry of blue electric plasma. Carl fired a burst from his four plasma cannons, scoring deep marks into an enemy’s cockpit. Fire bloomed momentarily, consuming the oxygen in the fighter and then dying. Its pilot dead, the spider spun silently out into the blackness of space. The skirmish was over in seconds. The spiders drifted limply, into the vast, empty sea of the void. “How many’d we lose?” inquired Carl over the intercom. The reply came: “Just Amos, sir. He lost control and collided with one of the spiders. No screams. Just went out like that.” The man snapped his fingers. Why don’t we make peace? Thought Carl. We lose thousands every day! Why? He pushed the thoughts aside; there was fighting to be done. ”Alright, men! Let’s take that ship down! Pushing his craft to the maximum, he and his squad screamed without sound toward their target. The dropships trailed behind, escorted by ten of his squadron. The others flanked him. They drew closer. Closer… Plasma bursts erupted around him as the ship’s hundreds of turret batteries trained onto one target: his men. He blazed through the hellish inferno of white-blue streaks toward the engines. He would take them down to cripple the ship’s movement, and then target the life support to finish the cruiser once and for all. A scream rang across the intercom. “Sir! I’ve been hit! My engine’s-“Silence. That was all in space. No thundering crash of the engine’s fuel combusting, no blood-curdling final shriek from the pilot as he was incinerated. Nothing. Silence. Was that all? A life snuffed out in seconds, like the flames of a dying fighter? Then the storm hit. A great tidal wave of spiders zipped from The Stain, hurtling among the small squadron, lacing a deadly, colossal web of plasma arcs to catch the men, like a spider hunting its prey. In the mayhem, Carl focused only on the engines. Five more screams. Five more nothings. He burst forth from the storm, Dan and Jim still flanking him, along with another squadmate. The others were busy thinning the cloud of insects which viciously tore at them. They neared the engines, dropships still tailing them. “Blast a hole for the marines, Jim! Dan, Lewis, bomb the engines into rubble!” They sped forward, unleashing the brutal carnage of their fusion bombs on their objective. After a second run, the engines were finished. The dropships had landed on The Stain, and Carl moved in to eliminate the nearby turrets. Once the area was clear, he shouted: “Alright men, let’s tear this ship’s life support to pieces!” He didn’t know why he shouted; the vacuum of space sucked away all sound, all fire, all life. Something about combat, though, urged him to shout. So he shouted. Sentries silently screaming around the cruiser, narrowly avoiding, streaks of plasma and dead fighters, the squadron approached its final target. They passed over it. The bombs fell. Splinters of metal flew away, glowing slightly with newfound radioactivity, from the spot the fusion bombs had hit. The Umbrians are probably dying horribly right now, thought Carl. It was true that the Umbrians could change their forms and live in a vacuum, but they could not suck the essence of their attackers without skin-to-skin contact. The marines would leave and the ship would be demolished, stranding the creatures in space forever. Either way, it was a lose-lose scenario. The pilots flew back to the Eris, and Carl knew the dropships followed closely behind them. Most of the enemy starships had vanished, and the remaining few were in full retreat. A hard-won victory for mankind. They docked in one of the hangars. As he disembarked from his fighter into the white-lit hangar, Carl recalled why the battle had been fought. The Umbrian fleet was attacking S-4, and the 29th fleet was called out to stop their assault. The battle had been fought in empty space outside of the system. A computer’s voice rang across the ship: “Casualty report: 7,842 sentries lost, 4,113 thunderhawks destroyed, 35 judicators lost. Deaths: 34,733 killed. Casualty report…” The voice repeated three times. “OK men, let’s hit the bar, then we’ll call it a night.” The time read: Intersolar Standard Time 114 P.M. The battle had been begun around 80 P.M. A short time, yet so many casualties. Later, as Carl lay in his bunk listening to his squadmates’ snores, he thought: Seven of those deaths were my friends! Seven…
I like your writing style very much Zerg. The constructiono of the story could be improved in a few areas, but this is still very impressive. I'm hoping to see your next chapter soon.
Here is a little something to tide all of you over, and my sincere apologies for procrastinating on typing up Chapter 2. I had it finished around... 3 months ago. I am going to rework it a little bit, and you can expect it posted within the week. So, without further ado, here it is: the beginning of the Umbrians, or Genesis of the Shadows! Genesis of the Shadows3572 B.C. A solitary form could be seen hovering slightly above the pale, sickly green grass. He was tall and thin, and his figure radiated power and wisdom. He was aged, but his stature betrayed none of his 90 years. He seemed to gaze into the sky, though he had no face. “It is time,” he thought. “It is time that I, Ha-ne-se, brought forth my people. I shall be known eternally as the progenitor of my race, the Ne-se!” He stalked over to one of the wispy, bare trees. The being knew not if these trees had always been the dark, immaterial things that they were, or if they had once been something else, something tangible he could not touch. This world was one of shadows, he observed, watching through cloudy, invisible eyes as a four-legged shadow-beast dashed across the vast, silent plain. The trees were shadows that any physical being would pass through. The grass was faded and only partly in the material dimension. Creatures here galloped about, some tearing into the dark flesh of prey while others fled from the vicious predators; all shadows. Even the land itself was only partly solid, and great sections of the landscape, though they appeared to be real, were only shades of land. Standing on one such expanse, Ha-ne-se looked up to the sky, where the black disc of the sun hung, giving off rays of shadow and beams of darkness. This was a planet of ghosts, a planet perfect for the Ne-se. Ha-ne-se had been alone for 90 years. His mind had pondered many things. He had made thousands of discoveries, using his mysterious knowledge of the material, and his own powerful thoughts to imagine and simulate them. However, he could not make his discoveries a reality, for they required what he could not have-connection with the tangible realm. He did, however, know himself. He knew of his greatest strengths: the power of his mind and will and his ability to drain the life from physical beings, allowing him to manipulate their forms. In a form, he took on that being’s abilities, strengths, and weaknesses. If he could find a material being, then he would at last be capable of interaction with the physical realm! First, though, he would bring into being the second of the race of the Ne-se. He concentrated, and channeled his thoughts toward Duplication. His form began to shake, and rays of shadow streaked from him. Time passed, and he trembled more violently, the streaks of shadow becoming massive waves of darkness emanating from him. Finally, a rip was torn in space and another shadow began to emerge from the rift. When the being was fully formed, Ha-ne-se spoke to the new Ne-se’s consciousness. “My child,” he said in the deep, stately voice of his mind, “I am Ha-ne-se, the First Living Shadow, father of our race. Our future people will need a leader. I have my own quest, and cannot take on this demanding role. Therefore, as first of the Ne-se, I declare you to be the ruler of our race, and I give you the name Ha-esh, First Ruler.” However, Ha-ne-se did not know that 90 years before, at the time of his birth –at the time he had rejected his Creator and called himself God, he had been cursed. He would live for millennia and continue to pursue his quest for the material, and he would, at last, be rewarded. His success would become his downfall, though, and in his mad lust for their physical forms, he would be driven insane, and his own people would be forced to slay him. And, at that moment 90 years ago, another being was created, and he was called Adam, the first of the human race, the race that would be the downfall of the Ne-se.
