Lore

21VERSE is set during the early stages of the Intergalactic Expansion, beginning in 2120. Though commercial space travel had already been readily available since 2075, the range of commercial spaceships was limited to Earth’s native solar system.

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## History

### Climate Crisis of the 21st Century

The Climate Crisis of the 21st Century was a historical period defined by worryingly high levels of carbon emissions and a total global temperature of 2.5℃. This lead to international crop failures, causing a massive spike in world hunger and great economic losses for agriculturally dependent cities, devastating heat waves to spread around the world that claimed the lives of thousands, and for multiple countries — notably Venice — to flood.

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#### The Flooding of Venice

On February 13th, 2070, Venice experienced a bout of unusually heavy rainfall. Paired with the fact the Italian city had steadily been sinking for the past decade — a phenomenon caused by both its low vertical distance and the melting polar ice caps — the rainfall resulted in an unprecedented, city-wide flood. At its peak, water levels reached 2.1m.

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### Starbucks-Spangled Banner Revolution

After Venice and Amsterdam became completely flooded due to melting polar ice caps in 2070, citizens of both cities began a revolt. Banding together to overthrow the multibillion dollar corporations responsible for the majority of carbon emissions, revolutionaries staged an assassination of the Starbucks CEO, Kevin Johnson.

The rebel group, comprising originally of 420 members and growing at an exponential rate of 6.9% per week, dubbed themselves the *Raviolution*. It was none other than Italian president Sergio Mattarella's own daughter, Laura Mattarella, who started the revolt through a Reddit thread. Despite originally being regarded as nothing more than an elaborate April Fool's prank (the group made their public debut on April 1st, 2020), they steadily gained support as they continued to champion their message of "fixing what greed destroyed". By May of 2070, the group had amassed a following of 160,000, over 60% of the city’s population.

*Raviolution* declared that Kevin Johnson enacted the plastic straw ban out of superficial concern for sea turtles and other marine life. Laura Mattarella, the president’s daughter turned leader of Raviolution, spitefully stated that, "(Johnson) is trying to redirect blame from Starbuck’s massive role in global pollution to individuals. He is trying to make global warming our fault for consuming products originally provided in excess by companies like his."

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#### Rotten Pumpkin Incident

On April 3rd, 2070, Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson is assassinated by Raviolution via poisoning of his pumpkin spice latte, hence the name of the event. Starbucks' Chief Operating Officer Rosalind Brewer was appalled at Johnson's apathy towards the worsening climate crisis. When she tried to convince him to take more action to reduce Starbucks' carbon emissions and pollution rates, he threatened to fire her. Frustrated with his actions, Brewer turned to Italian rebel group *Raviolution* for revenge.

While going for his morning coffee run, Brewer took the chance to spike Johnson's regular pumpkin spiced latte with cyanide, successfully and rapidly killing an unsuspecting Johnson. This event eventually kickstarted the mounting effort to reverse the effects of climate change, with corporations around the world fearing the amassing pockets of revolution that awaited them should they continue to overlook global warming.

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### Intergalactic Expansion

The Intergalactic Expansion is a time period directly following humanity’s acquisition of light-speed travel in 2120, finally allowing humanity to venture further than the Milky Way and into unknown solar systems. These efforts were funded by multiple corporations (including economic powerhouses such as The Walt Disney Company and Amazon) seeking out new methods to expand their profit horizons by way of exploiting possible resources and materials on new planet surfaces. Following successful efforts in identifying hospitable planets in a new system in relatively close proximity, efforts to terraform these planets for effective use were completed in 2121.

Seven years following this and the development of these planets for business, marketing, and economical use, efforts began to stagnate as all of the planets in the 1st System have been populated and used to the point where further exertion may result in unforeseeable terraforming consequences. Furthermore, efficiency saw a sizeable decline as more and more workers employed on foreign planets stole spacecrafts and escaped into unmapped spatial territories. In an effort to stimulate efficiency once more, the board of corporations opted to manufacture a programme intended to colonise more portions of the galaxy; this, however, instead backfired and led to the creation of the Uncharted Systems.

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### Creation of the Uncharted Systems

The programme designed in order to colonise further systems to the 1st System opted to recruit astronauts from existing galactic colonies in comparison to astronauts still residing in Earth, as it was believed that these recruits would have better know-how to survive and adapt to extraterrestrial environments. However, this proved to be a disastrous decision, as the astronaut recruits had been cobbled together from disillusioned corporate workers and alien lifeforms who are similarly disillusioned by Earth's colonisation efforts; this, in turn, led to a numerable portion of the programme's astronaut workforce to lose contact almost immediately with NASA's headquarters, causing the programme's prompt catastrophic failure. While crafts have been sent to investigate the sites of the astronaut forces' disappearance, the crafts were disallowed from venturing further into the unmapped territories, and thus these astronauts were presumed missing.

In an incredulously short span of a month, however, the whereabouts of these astronauts were found out following the sacking and pillaging of a cargo freighter craft transporting ordered Amazon Prime items: the astronauts have found sanctuary in hospitable planets located in the Uncharted Systems, reuniting with ex-workers whom have defected among the course of the prior seven years. The inhabitants of the Uncharted Systems now reject any form of authority, resorting to absolute anarchy among the sparsely inhabited planets encompassing two systems of considerable size. The Uncharted Systems are populated by smugglers, space pirates, and rogue corporations. With great reluctance, the 1st System authorities are unable to deal efficiently with the Uncharted Systems – this is because of a combination of the fact that while under-equipped, rising rates of defection contributed to the Uncharted System's population quickly outnumbering the forces owned by the Super-Corporations, and independent rogue arms manufacturers are producing weapons and crafts at an impressive rate, meaning coming to blows would certainly come to mass destruction and innumerable casualties and loss of resources.

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