Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

Loopstorm: A temporal eddy, caused in areas that have seen especially high useage of FTL drives, resulting from the fabric of spacetime being worn thin. When a vessel travels through such a region using an FTL drive, there is a chance that it will cause a loopstorm, locking random patches of spacetime into loops that repeat endlessly until the effect dissipates.

These loops cause a severe time dilation effect, either slowing down or speeding up the passage of time relative to normal space. As such, they can cause starship hulls to rapidly age and weather away, or they can trap sensor, systems, or even crew in a loop that can last hours, days, weeks, or even years.

As spacetime damage from unregulated FTL use becomes more pronounced, loopstorms have become more common, more violent, and longer-lasting.

“Hotship required,” read Slaus. “What’s that?”

“Ah, probably an infernian. Yeah, okay. They need a Form 227-B and they need to be put on a ship with an H at the end of its prefix. You can put them on something with PH as well, but only if you have to. H for Hotship, PH for Partial Hotship.”

“…okay?”

“Infernians need a temperature of 117 degrees centigrade, even in hibernation,” Owteon explained. “A hotship keeps that temperature at all times, so that if the hibernation cell fails they will simply wake up intead of dying and then exploding.”

These manifestations into the physical realm are called sprites, and there was no sprite more feared than Deathy Night. While some sprites, like Cloudsy Day or Flitsy Whim were uncaring or mischievous, Deathy Night was actively deadly when it manifested.

Taking the form of dancing lights, Deathy Night would attempt to lure victims away from hearth and home and into bogs and fens, where they would drown and perish. The sprite seemed to gain some sort of nourishment, or perhaos pleasure, from this act, as it would disappear immediately after such a killing and often fail to reappear for years afterward.

Like all sprites, Deathy Night could be repelled or even captured by a propery scryed circle. Records exist of one such capture, in which a daemonologist asked the sprite why it sought to waylay and murder when its lesser cousins were content merely to bedevil. The answer was apparently as succinct as it was chilling: “want to.” the notes were reportedly recovered from the daemonologist’s body after it was hauled from a bog three days later.

His given name was Fitzhope, after his mother’s maiden name, but he was universally known as Fuzzhop for the large shock of extremely curly brown hair he had as well as his boundless energy.

None of this was particularly appealing to the Fitzhope family themselves, being blueblooded and wealthy as they were, but Cynthia Fitzhope had been a black sheep even before her brief, doomed, marriage to Fuzzmop’s father, and she remained so afterwards, keeping her ex-husband’s name and a large part of his fortune to pay for her son’s schooling.

While Fuzzmop himself was easygoing, his mother’s hovering and the highly variable amount of cash at their disposal, which was partially dependent on stock options won in the divorce, led to the boy being enrolled, unenrolled, reenrolled, and transferred between endless high-caliber boarding schools both at home and abroad.

An increasingly uncommon shorebird, the Great Phooty takes its name for the distantly related Lesser Phooty, which makes a series of “phooty-phooty-phooty” cries as it takes flight when startled. Despite having rather similar plumage, especially when seen from a distance, the Great Phooty makes no such sound and is in fact usually silent. Other than the begging cries made by hatchlings on the beach, the Great Phooty only makes a sound during its making display, where it plummets to the ground while screaming alarmingly; luckily for all involved, each Great Phooty does this only 1-2 times per year.

I sing you a ballad of baked goods
As I unload them from the oven with glee
They may not be perfectly shaped, now
But at least they were all made by me

The UMS Rushmore is a perfect example of this: equipped with an early-model reality drive unit, it suffered a catostrophic accident while at high FTL, forcing it into realspace and into the gravity well of Cestus VII, where it impacted the surface with the loss of all hands.

However, the damaged reality drive has served to trap it in a collision loop of sorts, continually impacting the surface and being destroyed. A tug sent to recover it was quickly trapped in the same collision loop, being repeatedly smashed against the larger ship’s hull.

It has been in this state for 17 years, and it is unknown for exactly how long it will persist. The event forced a change in emergency transponder signal protocols, as the bands were being flooded with repeated distress calls from the Rushmore that could not be answered.

Naturally, you want to make sure that the gold you draw out into thread using this process isn’t evil–it must be good or at least neutral gold. Evil gold will often cause a rare event known as a loomstorm, where the threads will inadvertently form a gateway to a dimension of pure chaos.

When a loomstorm happens, the gate will widen and become self-sustaining, tearing apart the loom and allowing chaos beings to intrude into ordered reality, which is both dangerous and insane. Only by breaking the evil gold threads can the reaction be slowed, at which point it will naturally dissipate in a few hours to a few days. Any chaos beasts must also be hunted down and slain, lest they claw apart the order of the universe.

We’ll say it again: don’t spin gold thread out of evil gold.

When the last of the great flocks had come and gone, Mourning Dove was surprised to be called upon by her cousin, Passenger Pigeon, whom she had not seen in many an age.

“I have come to say goodbye, my dear cousin,” Pigeon said.

“But why?” said Dove.

“I am a voice in a chorus,” replied Pigeon. “Like any chorus, we must lift many voices to glory. But the voices are too few now, too few. We cannot sing, we cannot lift one another up.”

“Surely,” said Dove, “you could bear more young.”

“We find that we cannot. The chorus, it seems, is what led us to joy, led us to nest, led us to lay. Without it, there are few who can bear to raise young amid the deafening silence.”

“What then will you do?” asked Dove.

“I fear our song will soon fade away and vanish,” Pigeon replied. “That is why I have come to bid farewell.”

“What can I do?” Dove asked, despairing.

“Remember us, find joy in the remembrance, and bring forth new songs of your own. Farewell.”

Pigeon departed thereafter, and Dove never saw her again.

Great Mother Earth made all the animals, her children, and set them to walk in her embrace even as their distant father, Great Warming Sky, looked on with subtle detachment. Great Mother Earth so loved to create that she was endlessly occupied with the fashioning of new creatures, but her greatest joy was when her creations had offspring of their own, and loved one another.

But over time, she grew troubled. Great Mother Earth could not make her creations eternal, as their father had forbidden it. So as her creations grew old or sick and died, Great Earth Mother herself became sick with grief. When one of her creations, Vulture, approached her, he found her weeping.

“What is wrong, O Great Earth Mother?” asked Vulture.

“When my creations die, they are no longer loved,” she lamented. “They are forgotten and left to rot, even by their own families. If only someone could take these lost children in and care for them.”

“That is indeed very sad,” said Vulture. “It is also of a kind with my purpose in coming to you. My flock and I tire of the slaughter of our brothers, and we would ask that we no longer have to kill in order to survive.”

Great Earth Mother was perplexed. “How are you, a bird of the hunt, a bird of prey, to survive without killing?”

“You have given me an idea,” said Vulture. “Allow my family and I to take in the lost and forgotten children, to give them rest and purpose, to love them as we would our own. We will pay them that dignity unto the ends of the earth, and in exchange we ask only that we not add to their number.”

And so it was set forth that Great Mother Earth tasked Vulture with the tender care of all her forgotten children. In taking them into his bosom, in feeding them to his young, Vulture paid them the highest and ultimate compliment. In their death, they became his children too, and he loved his children very much.