Second Dark Period

The **Second Dark Period** was a 5,000-year era of Maruleegi history spanning from the fall of the Second Empire to the rediscovery of spaceflight and establishment of the first permanent interplanetary colonies.

## Beginning

During the Second Imperial Period, more and more decisions were delegated to prediction markets, due to the declining mental and physical abilities of the genetically modified ruling class. At the end, the government of the Second Empire abruptly collapsed, leading to a power vacuum that was soon filled by the corporations made by groups of Maruleeg citizens to succeed on these prediction markets.

## Race to the Bottom

The corporations running the prediction markets, completely unrestrained, slowly evolved to lose most of their original values. Without the Second Empire's much-hated breeding restrictions, the population of Maruleeg was larger than could be supported reasonably, leading to widespread poverty, and any corporation that attempted to deal with the problem found itself out-competed by its less compassionate competitors, leading much of the population to toil endlessly to support a tiny overclass of executive feudal lords. Over time, any corporation not focused entirely on growth and power was lost, with any small advancements in technology being absorbed into this race and making competition even harsher.

This environment also stilled cooperation; a corporation could gain a slight advantage by betraying anyone friendly, and those that didn't were out-competed in much the same way. Widespread enterprises were almost impossible, especially in the field of restraining climate change. Over the next few thousand years Escrib's climate was caught in a cyclic boom-bust, in which the changing climate conditions harmed the corporation's productivity enough that they died back, before repeating. Artificial plagues, and on one occasion a nuclear war, also had similar effects. Overall, historians identified around 23 of these cycles, ranging in duration between 20 years and 500 years.

## Spaceflight Enterprises

During the recovery from one of these periods, a particularly impulsively-minded Maruleeg CEO used surprisingly well-preserved missile technology to explore the possibilities of spaceflight. Widespread flooding and weather disasters had slightly weakened the competition, giving the corporation the tiny amount of spare resources it would need for such an uncertain enterprise.

This was successful, and the corporation began mining asteroids, with the wealth in space compounding exponentially. Space-based and planetbound colonies were constructed around the Maruleeg system, and in their ethos of intense and unrelenting competition declared independence from their parent corporation; without its space assets, it was rapidly absorbed into neighbouring corporations with the people enslaved, the CEO ritually executed, and the spaceflight equipment repurposed into weapons.

However, the abundant resources of space did allow for cooperation among the space colonies, which by now were vastly wealthier than the corporations on the dying Escrib and growing. By the end of the Second Dark Period, they had organized into early forms of the five factions present of the Quintarchy, and the First Colonization Period had begun.