The universe is so old that you might be persuaded to think it has existed forever, but it has not.

13 billion years ago the universe was born. In an explosion, in one single moment, all of time and matter and energy was spat out.

The universe mixed into a multitude of star spun galaxies, millions and millions of them each one unique in it's own way. Among the many millions of these 8 billion years after the big bang, the galaxy of the Milky Way was born.

The Milky Way was an insignificant galaxy, but after only half a Billion years, a orbiting planet of rolling iron was born. The ball of iron had a perculiar giant moon in the sky, able to protect it from the billions of tonnes of orbiting debris that constantly threatened to crash in and expunge the newborn atmosphere.

The universe watched this little rusted crusted ball of molten iron was now thick with a warm cloak of gases. 1 billion years later the crust had cooled on this particular rock, and something totally new began:

• Life was born.

Life. Life Life. And the pace of life quickened and after barely 0.2 Billion years ago even more complex life appeared. First life, then complex independant life, and then powerful freakishly life. What could be next the ether wondered and as if that wasn't shock enough barely a tick had happened when something happened that simply blew everything before it away.

3 billion years after life started, Humans appeared

The collpase Universe is set in a possible future of the human race. The basic premise is that humans have been around for a very long time and have travelled extensively throughout the Milky Way Galaxy and beyond over many millenia. humans broadly conduct this growth in a cyclical manner, expanding and contracting in phases of growth. This growth always occurs according to the rules of the technological time frame available to them: in a sense the technological ages seperate the types of expansion and contraction across arcs of time and repidity. The arcs of growth and retraction represent a pattern behaviour of for our collective species. Ultimately the Jéem govern the human race to avoid it's guaranteed destruction.

At the right technological ages, human settlement of planets and their terraforming occurs (during an arc of expansion). Afterwards retraction is usually (but not always) cyclical too, due to the inherant processes of the arc the expansion was in. Inevitably human colonies on planets become isolated and lost potentially even eventually totally seperated. Unable to support themselves technologically, humans will become seperated by huge amounts of time and distance, and generations eventually revert to a more primitive feral technological ages and then re-assert themselves slowly over millenia as a independant unique society un aware of it's ancestral origins.

Because the Milky Way Galaxy is so large and the arcs of time so long, all colonised planets are always effectively doomed. Sooner or later planets will be the victim of expansion, colonisation, retraction, and finally then feral reversion. This is a fundamental of pattern law. the irony being that this once reverted, feral planet can regain space mastery and populate a new world of itself and then go into a cycle of retraction and then isolation for the newly new world.

There is a determinism war that now rages between the forces of the Jéem and their allies the Illúme and that of the hidden ones, also known as the eighth.

The Trieoi are a much more evolved form of human from the elder days before the fall.