“One hundred years ago today, our forbearers brought together the hungry, desperate worlds, a scattering of stars, into a new constellation. This constellation was not a symbol, not a picture, but a promise. The promise of a better future.”
- Nanshi Crestone, 32nd Lyceum Presider (202 PA)
For millennia, the species of the galaxy believed they were all alone. Each government had work enough for generations simply in managing their own ever-dwindling supplies of food and fuel, air and other natural resources. No matter how carefully tended, these assets vanished alarmingly quickly until each world had no choice but to turn their attention to the distant stars.
All races were equally astonished to discover that they were not actually alone. Humanity particularly so as they foraged into the stars and they found their own kind exploring with the same desperate need. The native humans had named their homeworlds Hadra, Hyzaar, Mir, Prianus and Vanora. When it became the center of the budding new world alliance, Vanora was officially renamed Axis.
Though the human subspecies looked quite different, they were pronounced by the Ixthians to be nearly identical genetically. That verdict would be borne out by generations of fruitful breeding between the five races of humanity. Each planet had left their mark on the races. Hadrians were large and muscular from generations of high gravity living, with dark skin and eggshell white membranes to protect their eyes from their bright binary suns. The humans of watery Hyzaar were long-limbed and golden-skinned, with powerful lungs and strong stomachs. On Mir, lightly striped skin and verdant hair camouflaged them from fast grassland predators. The humans of Axis and Prianus bore no obvious marks of their homeworlds, but no one ever mistook the urbane Axials for the back-water Prians.
Together with the Lyrans, Ixthians and Dailons, the humans founded an interstellar government to regulate their shared needs for scarce and ever-dwindling resources. They named their new nation the Central World Alliance. The new-minted CWA struck out into the unexplored sectors of the core, searching out new resources, but found little. No more fuel or minerals or arable land than any of their homeworlds. Allied by the steep requirements of an ever-growing population and few means to fulfill them, the CWA settled and civilized the other habitable worlds of the galactic core. After three hundred years of toil, dozens of planets tamed and tapped to yield all they could, the CWA finally managed to make a passable living for itself.
