Crescent Expedition
Background
MIDD and the Alteran Plague
MIDD, Malgravean Immunodeficiency Disorder, has long been the bane of the Malgravean people, a genetic disorder that is endemic to the population of that country, it is the leading cause of death for the population, and the most important goal of the Malgravean scientific community.
Some speculate that the disease is related to attempts to retro-engineer the genetic imprints of the Alteran civilization, a long dead spacefaring culture whom many Malgraveans believe they are spiritual or literal inheritors of, into the population. In order to investigate this possibility the Ancestral Study Group, a major organization within Malgravean society, sent a number of talented archeologists to travel the Great Civilization of the C’tan to seek leads to assist them in developing new treatments.
In the Great Civilization Year 398 Second Era, one of the most successful of these, Amelia Lowwe, returned to Malgrave and made a presentation at the major New Horizons in MIDD Research and Treatment, to request support and funding for the development of what she believed to be a major lead on understanding MIDD.
During her journey to the Free City of Naár in the Gas Giant Baruthis, Amelia was able to commune with a memory-keeping Elder, one of the native Baruthi species, whose alien anatomy and long-dwelling life-cycles have made them able to inherit memories from millions of years in the past. By communing with this being, she was able to learn that the Baruthi recalled a time when the Alterans were affected by a plague with a similar progression of symptoms.
This information came with more than academic value though; for they also knew of the location of a world where the Alterans had used their advanced technology to fight their own, potentially related, malady.
Given that other Alteran relics have been found to be functional, even after millions of years in storage, the consensus was broadly that this was worth investigating. An expedition, funded by the Ancestral Study Group, and the Save the Malgraveans Foundation, to determine the possible viability of the site was set up as an Ancestral Study Working Group; international assets would be required, ranging from starships to experienced personnel, and the Ancestral Study Group asked the overall management and organization of the expedition to be run through one of Amelia’s long term companions, Rylux Crescent, Dystan Sage of Expeditions, whose high profile would inspire competence in the management of the expedition, with Amelia as Scientific Director.
Archaeology in a War Zone
Complicating matters greatly was the fact that the facility had a location only known to the star system, and the information on the location of the star itself was three million years out of date and second-hand; but as the astronomical information about the potential destination was analysed it became increasingly clear that stellar drift would have taken the site in question into the reach of the Unitarian Stellar Empire, a hostile power whose incursions in the Milky Way Galaxy were limited.
The main supporters of the Crescent Expedition in stellar terms, the Great Civilization of the C’tan was already involved in a prolonged low-intensity conflict with the Empire, aimed at preventing an ongoing genocide of the Elphegort people within the Empire; while sympathetic to the goals of the Crescent Expedition, the Great Civilization’s strategic operations group, under the command of Nemesor Kephrekh ita Novokh, were not willing to alter their plans or disclose their current operational priorities, as much of their work was secret and would force them to greatly accelerate their war on the Empire, with potentially millions of civilian lives lost; they also believed the risk of a conflict directly at the Alteran site entirely destroying archaeological value there made assigning a large scale mission counterproductive.
Instead they mandated that the system only be approached by ships under the two hundred fifty meter keel length, believing that this would be ignored by the Empire as a possible smuggler site, which the fringes of their empire had long suffered, and would refrain from directly assigning more than a liason from their own forces to ensure that, if possible, their ongoing war against the Empire remained entirely separate in the minds of their spatiopolitical rivals in the Empire. They were however willing to provide local intelligence and transport resources.
Gathering Support
Already Rylux and party could call on a number of allies, from other adventures, consisting of an initial party some dozen strong, as well as the Brotherhood of Heroes, a private military contracting firm from Crystal Spires, consisting of discharged military personnel, numbering in total fourteen hundred personnel: these could not all be released for the expedition at once however, and there were many skills required that weren’t available within that group.
It became a necessity instead to approach other nations for support…