“Backwoods” would be an apt way to describe the world of Sere. On the very edge of Alliance space it sits as the only colonized world in its star system. Even then, what colonies that persist are minute scientific research stations. Most people that come to this temperate world with a smile are graduate students.

However, dotted about this temperate world like fleas on a cat are villages of those who wish to abandon the modern way of life and live detached from the interstellar grid. By this point in time, most foods can be grown with the right methods of organic synthesis, so no agriculture nor hunting is exactly necessary for survival.

There’s only one method for communication out of Sere, and it’s the very same structure that all worlds use to communicate- Mwahs. Originally, they were called Micro-Wormholes or “MWs,” but people on average seem to have a chronic abbreviation habit. To keep things brief, a wormhole is punched through space and kept stable by a Negative Energy Ring, or a “Nare.” This allows signals to be transmitted through the Mwah across quite literally any distance with almost no delay whatsoever.

All of this being said, the ramshackle settlements of Sere have astonishingly few Mwahs to speak of. This isolation is by choice, and Mwah transmissions are saved purely for emergencies or hobbyists fiddling with knobs to see what interesting signals they can find.

In the eastern hemisphere, deep in a harsh desert at the center of the largest continent, the settlement of Kreint rests on the sand like an oxidized wild west film set. Old, rusted, decommissioned ships both large and small are abandoned here like interstellar freeway litter. Those who live on Sere are not one to discount a blessing, and gutted the ships that fell and reused their dilapidated metal to build homes, businesses, and all sorts of other structures. In essence, Kreint is a community of about a thousand tradesmen lost to the solar wind.

Garren Black was not so different. Only thirty years ago he was the top dog of the mercenary world- a sharpshooter unlike any other this side of the arm. But now, sixty-two years of age and not getting any younger, Garren sits within one of Kreint’s many dive bars as a nobody to most. But, like most, he chose this path.