THE WORLD OF A.U.R.L. AND FALISCO

THE VERSE — 2138

The year is 2138, and humanity has long since escaped the boundaries of Earth. What was once a species confined to a single planet has become a young Type II Civilization, capable of harvesting enormous amounts of stellar energy, constructing cities across distant worlds, terraforming hostile environments, and maintaining civilization across multiple planetary systems. Yet despite humanity's technological achievements, society itself has not become perfect. Wars, corruption, poverty, political disputes, terrorism, corporate influence, and inequality still exist. Humanity has conquered planets before it learned how to solve its own problems. The entire civilization is governed by the **C.G.G. — Central Galactic Government**, a massive unified government formed after the old nations of Earth and the colonies eventually merged politically. The C.G.G. maintains control over humanity's planets through seven major political factions, each representing different beliefs about expansion, military power, technology, independence, preservation, federalism, and human rights. The C.G.G. is powerful, but its enormous size makes corruption almost unavoidable. Among the greatest threats to its authority is **The Black Way**, an enormous terrorist organization responsible for attacks across multiple planets and infamous for the catastrophic **Europa Incident**, where a biological disaster involving the Biophage turned one of humanity's oldest extraterrestrial cities into a massive quarantine zone. In this universe, humanity possesses the technology to reach the stars, but its greatest dangers still come from humans themselves.

FALISCO

Falisco is one of the most hostile planets ever permanently inhabited by humanity, an enormous frozen world covered by endless glaciers, frozen oceans, mountains buried beneath snow, and violent atmospheric storms. Its blizzards can reach extreme speeds, making the surface almost impossible to survive without specialized equipment and turning the outside world into a constantly shifting white wasteland. Temperatures can kill an unprotected human within minutes, and visibility during major storms can fall to almost nothing. Falisco was originally considered almost useless for ordinary colonization, but its remoteness and harsh environment eventually made it valuable to organizations that wanted facilities far away from populated worlds. The C.G.G. eventually approved several industrial and scientific installations on the planet, with A.U.R.L. constructing one of its largest research complexes deep beneath the surface. The extreme environment was considered an advantage because it made accidental escape from the facility incredibly difficult. Beneath kilometers of ice and rock sits an enormous underground civilization of laboratories, factories, housing districts, power stations, transportation tunnels, medical centers, storage facilities, and containment sectors. The planet's surface contains only the visible portions of this infrastructure: armored landing platforms, communication towers, ventilation structures, drilling stations, reinforced entrances, and enormous industrial structures designed to survive the storms. Most of Falisco's important infrastructure exists underground, where geothermal systems provide heat and power while massive ice-processing systems provide water. It is here, beneath the frozen world, that A.U.R.L. conducts some of humanity's most dangerous research.

A.U.R.L.

A.U.R.L., the Advanced Universal Research Laboratory, is one of the largest scientific organizations in human civilization and one of the most influential institutions operating under the C.G.G. It was originally created to advance medicine, biological science, environmental adaptation, genetics, and technologies that could help humanity survive on other worlds. Over the decades, however, A.U.R.L. became increasingly secretive and corrupted, expanding into classified genetic engineering, artificial evolution, synthetic biology, xenobiology, biological weapons, experimental medicine, and military research. Officially, A.U.R.L. is regulated by the C.G.G., but its enormous political influence and control over highly classified scientific information allow it to operate with considerable independence. The Falisco complex is one of its largest installations, essentially functioning as an underground city dedicated to research. The upper levels contain administration offices, employee housing, medical facilities, cafeterias, security checkpoints, transportation systems, and ordinary laboratories, while deeper levels contain genetics departments, cryogenic archives, xenobiology chambers, experimental laboratories, biological storage facilities, and highly restricted research sectors. The deepest portions of A.U.R.L. are not even present on ordinary facility maps, containing projects that officially do not exist. One of the most heavily protected areas is the **Biophage Research Division**, where scientists study the biological organism that became A.U.R.L.'s greatest achievement and greatest mistake. Among the scientists working there is Dr. Elias Veyr, the lead researcher assigned to the Biophage project, a brilliant but morally compromised scientist who has spent years studying the organism and understands more about it than almost anyone alive. A.U.R.L. considers Elias one of its most valuable scientists, but even he knows that the organization has crossed lines that should never have been crossed.

B.D.P.

Connected to the A.U.R.L. complex is the enormous **B.D.P. — Black Detention Platform**, one of humanity's largest and most infamous prisons. The B.D.P. is not simply a tower but an enormous vertical prison complex constructed over generations, with newer sections built directly over older prisons, military facilities, research centers, bunkers, and forgotten containment areas. Its upper structure rises high above Falisco's frozen surface while its lower levels extend deep underground, creating a gigantic network of cells, security sectors, medical facilities, transportation tunnels, prisoner-transfer stations, armories, and restricted areas. The B.D.P. holds ordinary criminals, terrorists, dangerous individuals, political prisoners, and people considered too unstable or valuable to be placed in conventional prisons. Its connection to A.U.R.L. is both practical and deeply disturbing, as underground transportation systems allow personnel, equipment, biological materials, and prisoners to move between the two complexes without ever reaching the surface. A.U.R.L. has historically used B.D.P. prisoners for classified experiments, officially describing these transfers as medical studies or rehabilitation programs, while internal records reveal that some prisoners were deliberately used as test subjects. Beneath the modern prison are the **Old Levels**, ancient facilities that predate the current B.D.P. and even the modern C.G.G. Some were once A.U.R.L. laboratories, others were prisons, and some were both at different points in history. Entire sections have been sealed for decades, leaving behind abandoned laboratories, obsolete machinery, forgotten research archives, old containment chambers, and corridors that no modern employee is supposed to enter. The B.D.P. and A.U.R.L. are technically separate institutions, but underneath Falisco they have become intertwined, creating one enormous underground network where science, imprisonment, military security, and secrets exist alongside one another.

THE BIOPHAGE

The Biophage is A.U.R.L.'s most infamous biological creation, a highly adaptive viral-like organism originally developed through research into genetic modification, biological adaptation, regenerative medicine, and artificial evolution. Unlike a conventional virus, the Biophage behaves as though it possesses a primitive biological intelligence, constantly reacting to its host and environment while changing its own behavior. The first major experiment was conducted at an A.U.R.L. facility on Europa, one of humanity's earliest and largest extraterrestrial cities, where the organism was eventually weaponized and deliberately released as a biological weapon. The result became known as the **Europa Incident**, an enormous outbreak in which infected humans began experiencing extreme biological transformations, with their bodies continuously changing as the Biophage altered their biology. Muscle, bone, organs, skin, and other biological structures could undergo grotesque changes, while the infected increasingly became extremely aggressive and dangerous. The outbreak devastated entire sections of Europa before the C.G.G. eventually contained it, although the true involvement of A.U.R.L. was buried beneath classified information and false reports. The incident proved something terrifying to A.U.R.L.'s researchers: the Biophage does not simply infect living organisms; it adapts to them. Every host provides new biological information, and every new environment appears capable of influencing the organism. This is why the Falisco facility became so important. A.U.R.L. wanted to study the Biophage somewhere isolated, where a containment failure would be less likely to reach civilization. Falisco's extreme cold and remoteness made it the perfect laboratory. Deep beneath the planet, Elias Veyr continued studying the organism while A.U.R.L. attempted to understand its increasingly complex behavior. Then, in 2138, an unidentified ship crashed into Falisco, damaging the underground infrastructure and causing failures throughout A.U.R.L. and the B.D.P. Power began returning to abandoned sectors, sealed doors opened, old transportation systems activated, and containment systems began reporting abnormalities. The crash did not simply threaten the facility; it connected parts of Falisco's buried history that were never supposed to be connected again. Now A.U.R.L., the B.D.P., the forgotten laboratories beneath them, and the Biophage are all caught within the same crisis, while Elias Veyr stands at the center of it, knowing that the organism he helped develop may be far more intelligent, adaptable, and dangerous than A.U.R.L. ever intended.