Galactic Interior

> The beating heart of the galaxy... hmph. It beats too fast these days. - Voltaic
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## Astrographical Information

### Sectors

* Capital Sector
* Alradian corporate sector
* Senev sector
* Metro Sector

### Systems

* Caesar System
* Proxov System
* Al'arguni System
* Athorin System
* Metroen System

### Planets

* Nikrontri
* Galachai
* Alradia
* Metro
* Senevari
* Ginarai
* Kurafar

### Sub-regions

* Corporate Space
* Fyros Sea
* Commercial Core

The **Galactic Interior**, often referred to as the **Galactic Centre**, the **Core**, or simply the **Interior**, was the innermost and most populous region of the galaxy, the heart of human culture and the Ariphius Confederacy and a hub for politics, science, innovation, and commerce. The galactic capital, Nikrontri, and Galachai, were situated in the Caesar System of the Capital Sector, in the most densely populated and important region of the Galactic Interior, at the junction of most major trade routes in the galactic trade network, including the Alradian Way and Nikrontreen Run, making the location essential to cross-galactic trade, economic stability, and corporate commerce.

A significant portion of the Galactic Interior consisted of Corporate Space, within which were many corporate sectors of the Ariphius Confederacy, the autonomous headquarters of many of the galaxy's major corporations, specifically those within the Corporate Trade Alliance. The Varus-Sub Corporation was situated on Alradia in the Alradian corporate sector, and was essential to upholding the economy alongside other major companies such as the Taraeus Corporation, as well as producing warships and vehicles for the Ariphius Military.

## Overview

### Description

At a converging point of the galaxy’s major trade routes, deep in the Interior, was the Ariphius Confederacy’s city-world capital and the location of the Congress and Council, Nikrontri, and the neighbouring Galachai, the source of the Tybanni Trade Lane and accompanying sub-trade routes. Thus, the inflow of immigrants and opportunists was incessant - dev-humans and outer-regioners hoping to find wealth and comfort in the glitzy, grinding money powerhouse of Nikrontri. Billions were always on the move, refugee ships with every nook filled with another hopeful family from the Tributaries or the Fringes racing through the traffic of the Nikrontreen Run and Alradian Way, only to find the miles-tall skyscrapers already filled, as the immigrants were forced into the infinite slums of Nikrontri’s depths, left wondering if they shall ever see the sky again. Yet, the less fortunate face of the Interior was quickly forgotten, the brilliance of the luxury worlds of the great corporations more readily entering the minds of the Interior dreamers.

The other worlds of the Interior were bustling and salient, with tens of trillions living in their great cities amidst thousands of years of history, many of the worlds, per xenoarchaeological dating, believed to have been inhabited as far back as the aeons of the dominion of the Elder cultures, millennia before the Galactic expansion of humanity. These planets were colossal money printers, generating enormous revenue for the funding of the Ariphius Confederacy’s aggressive expansion through the production of goods and refining of materials brought along the endless trade routes from the mineral-hotspots of Edgespace. Alradia, the capital of the Varus-Sub Corporation, was a rocky, grey world dominated by industry, much of its surface covered in shipyards of skeletal military warships under construction, steeped in the wealth of the corporation and its majordomos but smoking, black junk piles at face value. At the equatorial centre of Alradia was the splendid, bright capital city of Varus, populated by billions of the galaxy’s richest. Senevari, yet another bustling industrial powerhouse, the central shipyard world of the Taraeus Guild and the manufacturing location of paraulixes. Proxov, of the Proxov Engineering Corporation, often considered the galaxy’s most proficient manufacturer of civilian spacecraft, another shipyard-dominated planet with a glitzy luxury city at its heart.

## History

### Elder epoch

Before their ultimate doom by their own cataclysmic wars, the greatest of the Elder cultures saw the ripeness and abundance of the Galactic Interior as humans did millennia later, and held out on the mineral-rich, dense worlds throughout their storied, devastating wars for aeons, the great developments they made in these core planets - Nikrontri and Galachai most importantly - delaying the inevitable stagnation of their thought-to-be-eternal power. Nikrobiru City was built upon the decimated ruins of a once continent-covering Elder city that was lost beneath tens of thousands of years of erosion and deposition; buried beneath the shifting soils and inundated by the Daroen Sea’s crashing waves and the choking storms of Nikrontri.

### Galactic Expansion

It was not until the Galactic Expansion, millennia later, that Nikrontri saw a new wave of conquerors. Originally following a path from the Fringe Colonies and the edges of the Inner Territories, a path that would one day be the Nikrontreen Run, the Prathax fleet and other colonists charted the way to the Galactic Interior, hugging the world-plentiful ‘safe zone’, bounded by the dusty foothills of the Galactic Centre. The Caesar System, where lay Nikrontri and Galachai, was settled circa. -6400 pregalactic, less than a century before the onset of the long and legendary Tsenic Period. Throughout the first five to six hundred years, the four million or so humans of the original Prathax and accompanying fleets rapidly multiplied and developed. Oblivious to the ancient continental city buried beneath them, the colonists became miners, and then builders, living mostly without conflict as a society governed democratically. But democracy quickly degraded to imperialism with the ensuing advances in colonisation and Nikrontri’s contact with smaller, far less developed colonies scattered across the underdeveloped, sparse bulge of the Median Rim and the very ‘Innermost’ Territories. No longer bound by the laws of a human state, the far more powerful Nikrontreens manipulated this reality, enslaving many colonies and hegemonising others. Meanwhile, the Tsenic Empire, the dominion of the Khast species - the alien descendent empire of a once intergalactic Elder culture, wreaked havoc upon other, more primitive alien species across Edgespace and the Fringes, and, in some instances, humans. With the initial Tsenic push into the inner galaxy, the slavers became the slaves. Nikrontri and other Interior worlds suffered the merciless wrath of the Tsen dynasty of the Khast. The Interior became the Khast labour camp to support their ultimate goal of everlasting galactic control; the Nikrontreen stone mined and borne by human slaves into Khast bioships was often utilised to construct vast temples dedicated to the worship of the Tsenic Emperor and his radical ideologies.

The collapse of the Tsenic Empire, six centuries later, and the subsequent liberation of the humans, led to a new wave of expansion in the Interior as the gaps were filled in and many other worlds were discovered between the newly established trade routes. The first generation in more than half a millennium to live freely made the most of their newfound power, colonising the Inner Territories in the following centuries of peace. The Galactic Interior became a beacon of power in the galaxy. Further colonisation efforts led to the rapid settlement of previously only distantly observed Interior worlds; Govlan being one, a planet of warm equatorial jungles, which later developed to be the epitome of Interior luxury and authority, surrounded by an artificial ring-city by the Second Galactic Era to preserve the lush surface of the world.

### First Galactic Era

Following the end of the expansion and the beginning of the First Galactic Era, millennia later, the Regime was founded in Edgespace, its establishment concordat made official in 1GE 256. Human colonies coalesced in an effort to finally gain full control over the vast swathes of the galaxy, but the Interior, meanwhile, remained external from this. By 1GE 370, the Regime made bold advances into the Median Rim, threatening the security and authority of Nikrontri in the Galactic Interior. Early lightspeed-capable warships hugged the borders of the Interior in the fifth century of the First Galactic Era, biding their time whilst being fended off by Nikrontreen control crafts at trade route junctions and outpost worlds.

Much of Edgespace and the Inner Territories fell under the control of the Regime in the First Galactic Era, while the clans on Nikrontri underwent decades of civil war. The Biru Clan left Nikrontri circa 1GE 1400, and slowly colonised the Caesar System, one planet at a time, extracting resources to expand further. The Biru Clan eventually established itself as a superstate, though its territory was confined to within the Caesar System, as the space agency did not yet have enough resource capacity for cross-system travel. The systems of the Galactic Interior surrounding the Clan were entirely Regime Colonies, closing in on the Caesar System, and the Biru Clan was almost subject to Regime nationalisation, integrated into their colonies, if not for the advancements in AI that was made, instead of a focus on expansionism.

The Ariphius Confederacy first established itself as a nation when it reformed from the Biru Clan, led by its monarch Gala Ariphius. The Confederacy expanded throughout the Caesar System as an imperialist federal monarchy, exploiting planets for resources which were put towards technological innovation and military expansion. Scientific agencies within the Confederacy innovated artificial intelligence significantly and successfully created the datasea, a network which had the ability to span the galaxy, storing all recorded information in its database and allowing instant communication over vast distances. The prototype controlling body of the datasea was Genesis, a powerful AI mind which allowed the datasea's instant communication, but it was later replaced by Intelligence, a superior artificial intelligence.

The strategically genius, inhuman tactics and plans devised by Intelligence allowed the Ariphius Confederacy to efficiently expand across the Galactic Interior, and rapidly grew to be able to combat the dominion of the Regime. The Regime lacked the technology of the datasea, and suffered because of it, as the Confederacy invaded Regime territory in a territorial war that marked the beginning of the War Era. Colonies formed political alliances with the Confederacy to take advantage of the power of Intelligence, and the Confederacy's territory grew to twenty times its size within in decades. The Ariphius Confederacy defeated and dissolved the Regime at the end of the War Era, marking the beginning of its dominion, possessing total control of the Galactic Interior.