Ockium

**Ockium**, sometimes called **Umbrite** in its mineral form,is a bizarre, dark black Metasubstance that possesses the uncanny ability to absorb and destroy incoming photons with unparalleled efficiency. Under the right conditions, this effect can be modified and shaped to make objects appear almost completely invisible with the help of Ockium.

## Characteristics

Ockium is the only tier 5 Metasubstance that can exist in the universe, as far as conventional science is concerned. It is comprised of nine protons and nine metons, which, like all Metasubstances, form a tangled mess in the nucleus of Ockium atoms. No natural processes that produce Ockium have been discovered, so any Ockium encountered in the natural world is assumed to be the product of alien experimentation. Pure Ockium, when synthesized in laboratories, is extremely unstable, like most other Metasubstances, but in its crystalline form it is rather benign. The process for how Ockium and other Metasubstances undergo crystallization is unknown, though it is also assumed to be an artificial process. Crystalline Ockium has a jagged, vertical crystal structure and is 100% non-reflective at all times, giving it an unnatural black color and causing many people to nickname it "the shadow mineral."

This color comes from Ockium's unique ability to absorb and destroy any photons it comes into contact with, making it completely colorless and non-reflective. This ability of the element is poorly understood, but it is believed to be a result of Ockium's unique meton and proton combination. Ockium exhibits a slight pull of photons towards itself, which becomes stronger as it becomes more concentrated. Extremely pure Ockium crystals have been known to generate an ethereal darkening effect on everything around them, absorbing and destroying all photons in the immediate vicinity around the mineral. How Ockium manages to attract photons without emitting any discernible radiation is unknown, but the effect is considered very beneficial, as it can be manipulated to create feasible cloaking systems for military equipment.

## Exploitation

The Kaeolian Empire was the first interstellar empire to experiment with Ockium to any significant degree. They found small amounts of the crystalline Metasubstance in the Triangulum Galaxy and analyzed them to find ways of synthesizing Ockium in the lab. They uncovered considerable data about the Metasubstance, but were unable to use it in any significant way due to its scarcity. Kaeolian cloaking technology was employed occasionally during the First Cluster War, but it was never used in large amounts, and very little of their cloaking research survived through the war. Ockium scarcity was something most empires that experimented with the resource faced, and it was one of the reasons why Ockium cloaking technology was rarely seen, even in high-tech wars in which it was very feasible.

The Mhrinian Concordat had a huge advantage when it came to Ockium-based technology. The Mhrinians had evolved on a planet with an unnaturally high Ockium content in its crust and upper mantle, so much so that the Metasubstance had managed to become a part of Mhrinian biology. Most Mhrinian technology made use of Ockium in some way, shape or form, and they eventually developed the single best cloaking technology ever seen in The Cluster. Since they sat on the largest deposit of Ockium known to exist, the burgeoning Coalition of Intelligent Organisms was quick to try and take the Mhrinian's Ockium bounty for themselves, first by peace, and then by war. The Mhrinian-Coalition War proved that Mhrinian cloaking technology couldn't be surpassed even by civilizations that were considerably stronger than them, and allowed them to survive for a considerable period of time afterward. The Mhrinians were finally destroyed at the hands of the Proxima Group, an organization that participated in the Galactic Revolution, who were looking to take such technology for themselves to gain an upper hand over the Coalition that they were rebelling against. The immense destruction wreaked upon the Mhrinians during this incursion, however, destroyed most of their Ockium reserves and the technology it was based upon, making it much more difficult for the Coalition to reverse-engineer such technology even after the Concordat had collapsed.

It is believed that most Vuokra tribes make use of Ockium to make their massive spaceships more difficult to detect in deep space. Red Six Trillion used this tactic to make their ships almost completely invisible against the black backdrop of space by coating them in a layer of crystalline Ockium, which made it much harder for other civilizations to recognize them. Since Ockium is one of the more "malevolent" Metasubstances in existence, many believe that the Vuokra are one of the first races to create Ockium, and are responsible for its existence in The Cluster. Since Pink Two Trillion, another Vuokra tribe, visited The Cluster many millions of years before the rise of the Serphiads, this is not much of a stretch. The Vuokra, of course, have never claimed that any of this is true, so the nature of crystalline Ockium, natural or artificial, is still in debate.