Ezrahai

The World of Many Names

Most people have lost count of how many different names have been given to the planet Ezrahai. It's often referred to as The Scoured World, The Marble, The Abandoned Prison, Humanity's Shame, Wrath, or more colloquially as Greg's World. Some of these names are intended as insults, some as reminders, but all of them have a grain of truth in them. Most importantly, however, it is home to the last human in the galaxy: Greg.

Beauty is Temporary

This planet has gone through several major transformations. However, it started as a huge, lush, vibrant paradise to most anyone. It had biomes capable of supporting life of all prime civilizations in the galaxy. It had sprawling forests, plains, mountain ranges, oceans of water, lava, acid, and fathomless caverns with multi-colored, bioluminescent fungal growth. In addition, it had a subtle, but pleasant, psychic humming resonance that played through the atmosphere that enhanced the minds and experiences of those on the planet. Truly, it was a universally appreciated thing of beauty. That is, of course, until Greg happened.

Ezrahai had the great misfortune of being caught in the middle of a void war between The Thranakon Empire and The Hectamaki Triumvirate. After its discovery, word spread like the mindfire throughout the galaxy about this gorgeous and resource-rich planet. It also had the disadvantage of being discovered in an unclaimed portion of space that was equidistant between the two empires. Naturally, both tried to lay claim to it and neither wanted to share, nor did one want to concede the planet to the other. Enter: Greg. He was working with the Hectamaki when he made the tactical recommendation to launch an Obliterator-class missile through Ezrahai's gravity well to hide the missile and launch it at the opposing force with extreme surprise and speed. However, a disastrous miscalculation was made and the missile was ripped apart and detonated in Ezrahai's upper atmosphere.

The Scoured World

This name was obtained because of the absolute devastation Ezrahai suffered not once, but twice (often joked that "one disaster wasn't enough").

The First Scouring

With the Obliterator missile detonating in the upper atmosphere, havoc was unleashed on the surface. An enormous crater was left in one side of the planet. The intense heat and toxic radiation caused mass evaporation and flash-boiling of the oceans, disintegration of the flora and fauna, and widespread topographical flattening. In mere hours, the entire planet had been rendered entirely unlivable.

The Second Scouring

Greg was afforded a great deal of leeway because of his scientific contributions to the Hectamaki and the galaxy as a whole. These contributions came in myriad forms (both psychic and technological) and, until the missile incident, were completely accurate and delivered without error. He'd built up an enormous amount of good will. The Triumvirate might have been more confused by the mistake than Greg had they not been overcome by fury, outrage, and disbelief.

Perhaps against their better judgement, they gave Greg the opportunity to amend his egregious mistake. They permitted him to draft the proposal for the Geomancers' Wellspring in an attempt to re-terraform the planet. Plans are always presented for these rituals and Greg's was checked, rechecked, and checked again from independent parties. It was sound, flawless, and without equal. There was no reason to doubt the veracity of the proposal. Thus, the ritual began.

During the ritual, everything was proceeding swimmingly. Greg and the Hectamaki observed from their expeditionary fleet in a distant orbit. However, as Geomancers are well aware, there's always the potential for anomalous occurrences during the Wellspring. Ezrahai's just so happened to be calamitous.

When the psychic resonance hit its peak, rather than plateauing the psychic flow to maintain a simple and stable ritual, the flow of psychic energy spiked, plummeted, and rapidly fluctuated - a behavior never seen before during one of these ceremonies. This level of instability in a terraforming process is untenable in any situation.

The planet cracked. Ezrahai exploded with extreme violence. However, rather than the ejecta being shot off into distant space, it simply stopped once it encompassed the expeditionary fleet in orbit. After a brief pause, the planetary material and the nearby fleet were sucked back into a singular mass and reformed Ezrahai as an entirely compacted, flat, gray sphere about one sixth its original size. Within a few minutes, the planet had completely reformed into a simple spherical mass.

The Marble

After the Second Scouring, Ezrahai became a perfectly smooth and monochrome planetary body. It looked like a planet and behaved like a planet, but it became something unlike any other planet in known existence. Many scientists began to question if it could still qualify as a planet as there were no geographical features of note, no resources on the surface or underground, no life forms of any kind. It was effectively just a gray ball in space.

The Abandoned Prison

As punishment for destroying a beloved and much sought after world, the Hectamaki abandoned Greg on the surface of his new, lifeless creation. With nothing more than simple rations and basic equipment, he was exiled to the new Ezrahai. He was left alone to die.

Humanity's Shame

Humans were maligned by the galaxy as a whole. They were viewed as bellicose, self-involved, and greedy. They are not missed from the Galactic Community because of this. The destruction and reformation of Ezrahai merely added to the reasons the rest of the prime civilizations are glad humanity is no more. It's left on star maps as a grim reminder of the final contribution of the humans...or so it was thought.

Wrath

In religious organizations across the galaxy, Ezrahai is often referred to as some sort of cautionary tale of hubris. Many in these circles think the catastrophe of Ezrahai is not Greg's fault, but rather a divine punishment from the gods. He was simply a witness - a harbinger. They don't think any higher of humanity as a whole, but Greg himself is sometimes perceived as a witless participant or even a victim in this event. It varies from one religion to the next.

Greg's World

After returning from The Weave, Greg was always viewed as a bit mad. A genius, certainly, but mad nonetheless.

Surviving on the now-barren Ezrahai was easy. Greg could easily enter and exit The Weave. He could find food, water, and other simple resources with relative ease. He developed a rudimentary base camp and began building out from there.

Most psychic practitioners can only conduct basic and short-lived expeditions into the Weave and can retrieve very few things of use. The Weave is a fickle thing. As other civilizations periodically checked in on the planet they were continually puzzled at the seemingly impossible growth of the buildings on Ezrahai. There were no resources that could be seen either visibly or through scans, yet Greg was building great big machines and factories all the same. After a while, Greg himself was no longer detectable. He was thought to be dead and the mystery of the factories was finally closed.

It was about a century before Ezrahai was re-surveyed. No one was prepared for what they discovered. Somehow, the entire planet had been converted into an interconnected web of surface and subterranean factories producing material at impossible scale. What's more, these were not primitive materials, but materials used in exceedingly advanced technologies. Research stations, fabrication complexes, and weapon and shield batteries exceeding any currently known capacities were operating at scale. It didn't take long for the horror to set in once the prime civilizations realized what they were witnessing.

They had not doomed Greg. They had unleashed him.