Cygnus Sector

The Cygnus sector is the primary location that Freelancer takes place in. the Cygnus sector is notable for being home to an array of unexplained phenomena not present elsewhere in the Milky Way. As of current day, dozens of species cohabit within the sector, all of them foreigners who came to the sector for their own reasons.

## History

### **The Architects**

The History of the sector begins hundreds of thousands of years ago, a species now only known as the Architects came to evolve at the heart of what would one day be the sector. Little is known about who the architects were, but they took to space when the races that would one day inhabit the sectors had yet to even dream of civilization.

All alone, the Architects expanded and created a massive empire, seeding thousands of worlds with the life of their homeworld, the Architects pursued sciences of all kind, learning secrets that even to this day have yet to be replicated, they manipulated the basic fundamentals of the universe and used them to create incredible devices, among them the jumpgate system which allowed their civilization to flourish, and cortical stacks granting them virtual immortality.

The end of the Architect came as suddenly as mysteriously; within but a moment it was as if their whole species disappeared without a trace, no corpse were left behind, no damage indicating a fight, the Architect merely vanished, the reasons why remain a mystery to this day.

### **The Ainars**

At the peak of Architect Civilization, the Ainars had only began discovering metallurgy, and yet they were aware of their starfaring neighbors whom they worshiped as divine. When the Architect disappeared the Ainars were deeply hurt and shocked, yet a new belief emerged: that the Architects had been punished for their sins.

Although they had not shared their advanced technology with the Ainar, the Architects had taught them many things; their philosophy of peace, equality, democracy and non-interventionism. After the Architect's disappearance, the Ainar's belief changed drastically, going against everything they had been thought.

When the Ainar reached space, their society had changed. They had become a rigid hierarchy bent on dominating all those who did not submit. Individuals were assigned roles by their birth caste. When the younger races came to the Sector, it did not take long for the Ainar to conquer them, subsuming them within their Hegemony, ever species they added were relegated to a single caste, a single purpose in the great machine that was the Ainar hegemony.

For thousands of years this was the state of the Cygnus Sector, the Ainar maintained strict laws against studying or interacting in any way with Remnant artifacts.

And then the Void Storm came, in a few hours the Sector was forever changed as habitats and worlds were ravaged, fleets destroyed and trillions died... When the storm receded, the Ainar were gone, not a trace left of them, just like the Architects they had disappeared.

### **Reconstruction**

Without the Ainar enforcing order, the Sector fell into chaos. Many worlds collapsed the resources they depended on stopped coming as the jumpgates had shut down. But from the Ashes, new powers emerged. The New Cygnus Coalition out of the Liberty system or the Inheritors out of the Nogalpo system.

It has been over a hundred year since the storm, intrepid explorers have braved the danger of Jumpspace bringing systems together and reopening a select few jumpgates allowing civilization to flourish once more. But the people of the sector are fractured and the shadow of war looms between the Coalition and Inheritors, whose power is also insufficient to maintain a true grasp over their territory.

It is within this chaos that Freelancers make their fates, existing within the gaps, not only surviving but thriving.