Fractured Realms mod for OpenRA

Welcome back to the archive Commander,

I see you’ve been contemplating the archive’s Diastim crystal. Quite the piece isn’t it? I had the privilege to be present when it was moved here. In the brief time it was transferred from it’s previous containment field to this one, it managed to generate quite the show!

Come to think of it! When we think of Diastim, the first thing that comes to mind is it’s bright crystalline shards, however, they are actually a recent development. Indeed, for the longest time Diastim was just dust, micro flakes that settled on the hull of ships when they traveled through subspace.

In fact, Diastim was discovered during the early trials of FTL travel technology, when humankind was still figuring out the physics of subspace.

Scientists of that time theorized that our universe’s expansion might not be homogeneous in all dimensions and that, in some places, the “walls” were stretched thinner.

Some experiments were performed in order to launch subatomic particles through said “walls”, and they found out that when doing so, unknown new particles were breaching back into our universe.

Nevertheless, the real breakthrough came with the launch and subsequent return of A:Rn, the first subspace probe, a robot designed and equipped to travel across subspace and return.

Upon returning home, it was covered with a thin layer of strange dust.

This was humanity’s first encounter with the reality warping cristal as well as the beginning of a long struggle to study and control it.

Because, you see, Diastim is hazardous in nature. It comes from outside our universe, follows rules we still do not fully understand to this day and has wild reactions to external stimuli.

In fact, under the right circumstances, any atom thrown at a Diastim cristal can bounce off its surface, transmuted into its antiparticle counterpart, which can cause immense damage.

Experiments with clocks have shown that time can be heavily distorted around it too, Which gives weight to the ghost stories of people encountering themselves when working around massive deposits of Diastim.

It can emit in the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from gentle heat to violent gamma ray outburst, including visible light, as you can see from this beautiful nebula pattern inside the crystal.

Oh! and it bends gravity, which means we had to secure furniture and various pieces of the collection when we were installing this cristal here for exemple.

All this is why a crystal such as this one can be a phenomenal hazard if not handled properly.

Therefore when the nodes “barfed” them into our galaxy during the Fracture, you can imagine the devastation they caused to nearby systems.

Now, for a bit of interesting trivia, we are still not entirely sure why the flooding stopped. The previous theory, which was that the flow progressively stopped due to the nodes finishing their stabilization process, has recently been disproven. Indeed, some guys managed to destabilize a node in a lab and nothing came out of it. Their current theory is that there was some kind of pressure difference between our universe’s vacuum and subspace and it was only because enough Diastim had poured in our universe that the nodes could reconnect and stabilize.

Yet I'm not convinced I’m pretty sure the reason nothing came through is because these guys knew what they were doing. They poked into an already existing node with a far more advanced subspace needle and with safety mechanisms… After all, we approach subspace with far more care nowadays.

By contrast, the Merveille Project was the opposite, it was a moon sized superstructure, meant to tear a hole through the wall of reality… exactly where it was at its thickest.

I mean it worked, they managed to create an artificial subspace node, they just fucked up the entire universe in the process…

Special thanks to Mairwen who proofread my awful writing.