Charybdis Galaxy

## **Charybdis Galaxy***The Galaxy of Life*

THIS PAGE WILL BE HEAVILY REFORMATTED. ALL TEXT HERE ISN'T CANON ANYMORE.

## **Overview**

The **Charybdis Galaxy** is a smaller-than-average intermediate spiral galaxy located in an relatively far orbit around Cosmoria. Despite being Cosmoria's only satellite, Charybdis is said to be such a magnificent galaxy that it attracts a high amount of tourism in Cosmoria and of course Charybdis itself. This close orbit results in one of the most attractive views both during the day, and night on most worlds in Cosmoria.

Politically, Charybdis is divided into over ten thousand individuals civilizations, which qualify as interstellar. The bulk of these civilizations are tiny Type I or II civilizations. The largest by area and population of which is the Federal Assemblage of Charybdis, totaling at over forty-five billion stars. The rivaling nation to Federal Assemblage of Charybdis by population is the Arcturium Civilization, and the second largest in terms of area alone is the Thalian Interstellar Commune.

Charybdis was once one of the most decentralized areas in the universe, before the great reformation in 94,624, a large-scale event during which most of the thousands of nations present in Charybdis united into two even larger civilization. After colonizing most of the galaxy, with nowhere to expand, this nation has begun to enrichen their colonized systems, known as the great enrichening. This period of the galaxy is still in progress, with many megastructures being constructed each month, and hundreds of worlds populated every single week.

Charybdis has given birth to many thousands of sapient species, some which have fallen and destroyed themselves, and some have propelled themselves toward being the most influential species in the galaxy. The galaxy is so abundant in life that around ninety percent of star systems have unicellular life, and one in five systems has multicellular life, be it tiny and insignificant hidden deep in the seas, or thriving across the landscape of an unimaginably alien moon. This has led to Charybdis being the most life-filled galaxy in the entire known universe.

## **Astrography**

### **Structure**

The Charybdis Galaxy spans 35,000 light-years, or 10730 parsecs, in diameter. The bright disk of the galaxy includes about eighty billion stars, of which only about half have been adequately examined by the Charybdis galactic society by the 100th millenium. Deity's Unifier, a supermassive black hole with a mass of almost two million stellar masses, sits in the center of the galaxy.

The galaxy bulges around the galactic core, forming the Deep Core, a luminous sphere. This area spans around two thousand thousand light-years and includes ten billion densely packed stars. The stars of the Deep Core are just a tenth of a light-year apart at the center, and have been known to crash and rip out each other's stellar cores.

The Deep Core is surrounded by a disk of spiral arms that contains the majority of the galaxy's stars. The Chara Arm, Kasaria Arm, Antareia Arm, and Kaller Arm are four spiral arms named by Charybdis' galactic civilization. The brightest supergiant stars, as well as blazing clouds of gas and dust, are concentrated in the spiral arms, contributing to the apparent gaps between the arms despite the fact that those locations are densely packed with stars.

Most stars lie within a thousand light-years of the luminous disk's plane, comprising the inner disk, which spans two thousand light-years. The outer disk extends for three to five hundred light-years on either side, and contains fewer stars than the inner disk, with even fewer having a system of planets.

## **Political Astrography**

The galactic regions of Charybdis are the galaxy's largest borders. These are largely cultural regions as opposed to political ones, and generally correspond to stages of galactic exploration and settlement by the Aquelis and Khadoor, being the most widespread species in Charybdis.

### **Abyssal Halo**

   The **Abyssal Halo** is the galactic halo of the galaxy, extending outward to fifteen thousand light-years from the edge of the galaxy. Currently, Abyssal Halo remains as the most unexplored region out of all the galactic regions of Charybdis. The two reasons for being so unexplored are that it is simply too far from any nations, and it is filled with an exceedingly high number of primordial black holes travelling at a high velocity, requiring any starmaps that contain the Abyssal Halo to be frequently updated. These black holes have limited many of the Charybdian nations to just inside the Charybdis Galaxy. The Abyssal Halo is the only part of Charybdis that is receiving the intense radiation generated from Cosmoria.

In total, the Abyssal Halo contains around a million catalogued planets and moons, only four of them having indigenous life that survived from the radiation of Cosmoria, as the cause of current scientifically unexplained reasons. Many theories speculate that long ago, a few extinct alien species decided to protect those few worlds. To this day, the question of why did the aliens protected only so few worlds still remains unanswered, and is used against this theory. Another theory states that these worlds are protected by a currently undetectable energy field shielding against the deadly radiation.

Abyssal Halo Space currently has sixty seven remote colony worlds situated in the borders of the region. While remote, they have been slowly transforming into self sustaining colonies, with no outside help from the nations of Charybdis a being needed at all to function properly. These colonies are situated in two extremely close open clusters called the Drakt and Zarael clusters. The most heavily populated of these colonies is situated on the desert moon of Avaria, positioned orbiting fairly close to the azure-blue gas giant of Theseus, itself being situated near the borders of Abyssal Halo. With a population of a billion, it is well known among many explorers in the Abyssal Halo, and oftentimes used as a waypoint for starship repairs and fueling by the aforementioned explorers. Many of these self-sustaining colony worlds are connected by primitive Hyperlanes, and are planning to form a fairly small-sized democratic nation. Abyssal Halo itself as been referred to as the Essence Region by it's few inhabitants.

## **Hyperlanes**

Hyperlanes are the essential backbone of galactic civilization in Charybdis. A Hyperlane is a volume of space connecting two or more star systems that has been deliberately cleared of particles and other obstacles for the purposes of maximizing the efficiency and safe speed of faster-than-light technologies.

Hyperlanes are most useful for the usage of the Quantum Shift Drive, an advanced faster-than-light engine used by most of the population in Charybdis. While a ship is in Ascension Plane, shadow-versions of existing objects appear, causing heavy damage to the pilot passing through them, or even destruction of the ship. This danger is the primary reason for the abundance of Hyperlanes in Charybdis, as Hyperlanes clean major routes from any objects.

Many large Hyperlanes, also known as super-Hyperlanes have been constructed by the galactic population. These run through the entire galaxy, stretching from Deep Core to as far as Borealian Concouurse. All of these super-Hyperlanes connect various major worlds together. Examples of this are Dorentia, Ceruleopolis and Aziel, along many other. Super-Hyperlanes typically branch off into various smaller Hyperlanes, all of which are connected to at least a singular major world. As of this decade, around ninety-eight percent of colonized worlds are connected with Hyperlanes.

Travel without Hyperlanes in Charybdis is practiced only rarely by the most daring of pilots. To successfully traverse interstellar distances, the pilot has to make use of an highly advanced supercomputer to run the jump calculations.

## **Demographics**

### **Species and Races**

Scientists are unsure of the exact number of sapient species because only about half of the galaxy's eighty billion stars have been carefully examined. The Federal Assemblage of Charybdis has recognized twenty thousand sapient species, though it is mathematically accepted that galactic civilization has yet to discover a large number of sapient species and the total could be as high as a hundred thousand.

The most populous and dominant species are the Aquelis and Khadoor. Hailing from the same aquatic planet in the Aternum Conflux, these two specie have had a rough history of wars and death. Over time, the two species grew more accepting of each other, eventually working together to expand into the deep space.

## **Satellites**

While Charybdis does not have any satellite galaxies itself, many small globular clusters and nebulae orbit galaxy. These have been marked satellites by the Federal Assemblage of Charybdis.

## **History**

### **Prehistoric Era**

#### **Formation**

Charybdis started it's formation around 13 billion years ago, a period in time during which many of the most major and influential galaxies had began to from in the Local Universe, such as Via Sagittaria, Flower amongst many more, a small number of which of which do not even exist anymore, lost to the eternal and universal flow of time. During many millions of years, Charybdis started to grow into a spiral shape, far different from the near-irregular galaxy it used to look like during it's past, completing it's formation.

It was a chaotic period for Charybdis, infinitely littered with the remains from the time of early formation. Over the course of time, the first planets started to form in the accretion disks of some of the very first stars in Charybdis itself. Naturally, process itself repeated itself all across the entire known universe, with absolutely no expectations anymore. Some planets were too small and got captured as moons around larger and more massive planets, and some would be even thrown out of their respective systems by the most massive of planets. All of these planets would suffer from the same depressing fate, as the planet's parent star started getting tinier and tinier by the day, until eventually it was one of the many tiny dots cluttering up the sky.

#### **First Appearance of Life**

Life, being a constant in the universe, and having abilities of extreme adaptation to survive on nearly every environment scattered about the universe, started evolving from simple organic compounds all across the many planets and moons. The very first life in Charybdis, and the entire universe itself was purely microbial, being tremendously small in size. Most of these lifeforms would be genetically able to replicate themselves into two individuals. Each time when replicated, the individual would have tiny changes, which caused evolution to begin all across the entire universe. Smaller lifeforms would evolve into bigger ones, which each time when reproduced started getting more complex.

This life would evolve into more and more intelligent organisms, until the mostly dead at the time Charybdis galaxy saw the rise of it's first sapient species. Dubbed the Antecedents, this species was born before any other, during a chaotic era when Charybdis was littered with supernovae, high-radiation environments and space debris crashing on many worlds. So little is known about the Antecedent species, that it is theoretically impossible to determine the world the species was native to, their culture, technology, appearance and much more. Only the most basic of knowledge has been unlocked, as nearly no knowledge from that era has survived for such an infinitely long time. Only a single ruin of the Antecedents has survived, situated in interstellar space near the Lenten System of the Outer Core. What is certain, however, is that the Antecedents went extinct by their own creations, as hinted in the audio files of the previously discovered ruin. In these audio logs, a narrator talks about an immortal entity, that is hunting down every individual of their species one by one.

#### **Collision with Scylla**

While Charybdis was slowly drifting away from the confines of the Local Universe, it encountered an average-sized galaxy named Scylla, which is estimated to have been twenty thousand light-years in diameter. Charybdis happened to be on a collision course with Scylla. This merging process was long, but eventually the two galaxies merged into the singular galaxy today known as Charybdis.

### **Guardian Era**

#### Rise of Guardians

Guardians are some of the very first well-documented and widespread sapient species that existed at an era so far in the past, that they are the only known sapient species documented to have lived. After reaching interstellar travel seven billion years ago, the Guardians had realized that the galaxy as a whole was empty, and though that they were the only sapient species in existence at that time.

With an entire galaxy to conquer, the Guardians started expanding. First from planet to planet, then from system to system, until they had nearly half of Charybdis in their territory. (WIP)

#### **Blessing of Halycon**

Nearly seven billion years ago, during the prime of the Guardians, Charybdis was nothing more than an empty wasteland, scattered with some life across it's systems. Sapience was even rarer, though it existed in many forms. In a short span of time, which was likely a thousand years, an exceedingly anomalous even struck Charybdis. This anomaly is the result of extensive expansion into Aeterna Caligne by the Guardians.

This fascinating anomaly was likely a large inter-dimensional rift that released a large amount of Halycon into Charybdis. Halycon is one of the many resources native to Aeterna Caligne, and has some of the most unique effects known to scientists. A prominent property is the ability to absorb all radiation that is generated by a massive quasar. This effect, however, would only come to effect when Charybdis got into an orbit around Cosmoria some two billion years ago.

Halycon is also for the responsible with the creation of Clantine, an element created by the magical infusion of carbon and various Aeterna Caligne's materials such as Aether. Clantine is nearly identical to carbon, but would be way more widespread in a few ways. Clantine would never make up the composition of a celestial body, but it would make any life incredibly resistant to it's native environment, creating many lifeforms that are perfectly able to withstand their native environments, thriving and flourishing in them.

Nearly anywhere where Clantine happened to be concentrated in, life began. Originally, all of these organisms were simple single-celled organisms. In most cases, these single-celled organisms advanced into far more complex lifeforms, giving birth to ecosystems such as seen on Auralia, Aziel and Radia. In many billions of years, around eighty-five percent of all planets, moons and other such celestial objects in Charybdis had completely unique and complex ecosystems, thriving and flourishing in nearly every environment on their homeworld.

Along with Clantine, Halycon gave birth to a completely unique set of resources native to only Charybdis. All of these new and unique resources have been collectively coined the Halycon Elements. The Halycon Elements are the primary reason for Charybdis' extreme wealth. Each minute, many trillions of tons of Halycon Elements are being imported to other galaxies such as Zalanthium.

## **Timeline**

### **Key**

Any editor of things in the Charybdis Galaxy may add to this timeline to include events in their work.

Anything in **bold** is considered to be a major event.

BCE - Before Common Era

CE - Common Era