Editing TNE:GreatExpedition (section)

=== Detailed Backdrop ===

==== The Old Expanses ====

[[File:http://i140.photobucket.com/albums/r14/drifterne05/map3a.jpg]]
One of seven sectors that makes up the Trailing Cluster, the Old Expanses have been settled by humaniti for over 2,000 years. It is connected to the Greater Terran Sphere by a Starlink of 16,000ly, located at Juncture, a blue supergiant. Shunts from this Starlink reached out into all the Sector capitals, and some subsector capitals.

==== Potted History ====
The third Terran Commonwealth collapsed into regional infighting approximiatey 450 years ago. Out of this arose a more feudal system, the Imperial States – a reversion to the most primitive power structure on a stellar scale. While there were variants and splinter empires, the core of the Trailing Cluster became integrated into the greater Imperium in the mid-late 800s. 

Three centuries of Imperial expansion followed, resulting in an odd, codified noble class that pervaded all interstellar movement. This was the classic "Imperial" phase, with precise and lengthy qualifications for Imperial standard coding in all aspects of interstellar life.

By the 1100s the system was collapsing from within. When the Emperor died without issue in a tense political climate, the existing slow cold war declined into civil rebellion, with no clear candidate for the Imperial throne.

It was 25 years into this slow conflict when the Others came.

Humaniti had encountered many intelligent races already. The Vargr, Orca, and Delphines had all been uplifted from original Terran species, though someone else had done the work on the Vargr. Same with the Aslan, though it's hard to get them to admit it. Of true aliens, there were the Droyne, Bwaps, Oost Urda, and half a dozen other sentients. 

The Others were different. They were cybernetic life, switching and changing their bodies as we switch and change clothes or vehicles. Their technology was as alien as their approach. They ''processed'' the worlds they captured, adapting them on a worldwide scale to obscure and odd purposes. They incorporated Imperial technologies into their own, changed their approaches, modified their forms… 

On top of civil war, the Terran sphere now struggled to meet an entirely new menace. Worlds and fleets died, desperate measures were taken, old knowledge unearthed, black ops research dug up. When the last grand fleet met the Others' massive push into the Core systems, they released a viral code through their own data streams, knowing the Others would intercept it. The virus was designed to destroy their ability to collectively communicate; in theory, this complete isolation would cause the individual "units" of the others to suicide. 

This code was intercepted at the same time that the Others transmitted something new of their own: an AI adapted to Imperial computer technology, designed to infiltrate and alter Imperial systems to give itself life within them. These two systems met on the battlefield and created a synergistic loop. Within a year, the effects had completely destroyed the Others and devastated Imperial civilization.

==== Virus ====
A hybrid cybernetic lifeform, born of alien AI and a black ops suicide code. It swept across known space at the speed of the ships that carried the news, with the twin drives to breed and to kill itself. Hijinks ensued. 

The higher the tech of a world, the more reliant it was upon linked system technology. Virus invaded, took over, then tried to breed and/or kill itself. It mutated like crazy, after the truly suicidal 90% took themselves out of the cybergene pool… but not before destroying known space. 

One hundred and two years later, the Dawn League is just recovering from this. 

==== The Dawn League ====
Why them? Why'd they get lucky? 

Three things: Isolation and unique circumstance. And the Schalli.

* ''Isolation.'' Most of the worlds of the League only had Jump-1 contact with a string of minor worlds, far from the busy jump lanes that fed the starlink shunts.
* ''Unique circumstances.'' The Aubaini managed to maintain a continuous space presence throughout the Collapse. The Oriflammen had half a small fleet offline in surface repair bays, and a desperate need to use them. Balduri had to hammer out a colony plan to live. This confluence of small worlds, for different reasons, risked stellar contact long before other worlds were capable and willing. Aubaini met Oriflammi met Balduri met Teldori and found that trade worked better than raid.

==== The Schalli ====
Originally classified in the Imperial system as semi-sentient, the Schalli were the subject of three sensor-novels by Cann Macaffey: ''Waveriders of Vras'', ''Starfollowers of Vras'', and ''Schalli Rising,'' that do greater justice to their rise into interstellar space as a species. 

To keep it succinct: the Schalli had been interdicted and studied in the Imperium, and the humans on Vras (now called Aubaine) had been kept in the dark about their true sentience, largely due to mining rights on Vras, which was incredibly full of rare earths. The waterworld of Schall was stocked with collected Schalli and represented as their "native" world, while Vras's schall were said to have been transplanted by early Terrans as foodstocks before their status was upgraded to semi-sentient.

The Collapse drove many of the survivors on Vras underwater; more time was spent with actual Schalli; old records and research, long suppressed, was not replicated; and communication opened. 

What happened next is now legend. The Schalli, already far more capable in complex mathematics and three-dimensional engineering, took to technology like ducks to… well… 

Their cultural explosion ran directly opposite to all theories about advanced cultures crippling more primitive ones. They absorbed knowledge into their culture rapidly, and skipped past several human stages of adaption, with human assistance, into a rapidly-modernizing undersea sentient race. While doing so, they incidently helped provide the underpinnings for the Dawn League: without the Schalli, the Aubaini would not occupy the position they do, as de-facto leader of the Federalist movement; without the Schalli's drive to the stars, cultural awakening, and almost total species devotion to the "new songs", the League would not have the technology and industry that it does. 

The Schalli are pragmatic about their new status, and are determinedly collaborative in the Dawn League, financing and building for the Reformation Coalition far beyond their chartered requirements. They have begun a limited about of building to put Schalli themselves into space - in craft purpose-built for them, rather than converted from human designs. There is a Schalli fleet over Spencer, and a scout expedition to Trailing. This is the major wedge between Aubaine and Oriflamme, who sometimes accuse the Schalli of using humans as stepping stones in their own race to become a stellar species. 

Aubaine and the Schalli provide the League's high-tech industry, and Oriflamme and Teldora provide its manufacturing capacity.