The VastReach Door Incident

The VastReach Door is the first and only known Abnormality Object to have been ‘destroyed’. The incident, colloquially known as the VastReach Door Incident, occurred during a skirmish between rival Territorial Governances, the Imperial Council of Planets and the Lupine Democratic Monarchy. A battle in which both sides fought to retain possession of a simple door.   A simple wooden door in a simple frame, bereft of a wall and standing by itself with no aid. This strange, simple door would lead to open conflict, an explosion, serious loss of life, and no winners.   What led to this incident was a discovery. A discovery about a door and its abilities. You see, the VastReach Door, as it would come to be known, is an Abnormality Object. A powerful yet often absurd item that defies all logic.   Discovered some years prior, the Imperials seized the VastReach Door and immediately began researching its capabilities at a research station in a quiet corner of Imperial space.   What they eventually discovered was that this door could teleport you vast distances across the entire Delta Space. You simply had to knock upon the door four times rhythmically, no more, no less. When this ability was first discovered, there was immediate excitement. But that energy quickly subsided as the researchers found that no matter what they did, the door led nowhere useful.   Empty space was its most frequent location. On a few occasions, it appeared too near a star and instantly vaporized a handful of researchers. No matter how they knocked, where they knocked, or what rhythm they knocked. It was always nowhere nobody wanted to be.   But in the end, it was the rhythm that mattered. One day, a young researcher stumbled upon a fateful knock. *tap*….*tap*.*tap*...*tap*   When the door swung open, what lay on the other side was both astonishing and horrifying. The researcher’s smile quickly dropped, as did his heart, as it lurched towards his stomach. What lay beyond the simple wooden frame was the foyer of the Office of the Imperial High Consul on Phorbaceus Imperia. One of the most secure locations in which the entire Imperial Council of Planets was governed. And an immense security risk.   And while the researcher immediately closed the door, and reported his findings to his superiors. His actions in wiping the information on the specific knocking rhythm was not quite quick enough. As spies were able to ascertain the information and share it with their cohorts in the Lupine Democratic Monarchy.   The Lupines immediately began planning a dangerous mission to steal the door, as the opportunity to have a literal back door into their enemy's home was worth the immense risk. And a risk they certainly did take, as a small Lupine force snuck into the facility, expertly bypassing the research station’s security and quickly absconded with the door.   Unfortunately for them, they were spotted and alarms were raised. The Lupine would escape with the door in their grasp, but a frantic chase would begin with the Lupine racing their craft towards their territory with the Imperials close behind.   Soon, both forces would swell, with dozens of ships amassing on either side. Soon, the chase would end, and the battle would begin. With spacecraft zipping about, firing volleys at each other in an hours-long skirmish that would eventually end with the Lupine ship, in which the door was stored upon being struck and skuttled. Before anyone had the opportunity to grasp the ship, it plummeted and crashed on a nearby unnamed moon.   Both forces streaked towards the moon in a mad dash, continuing to fire upon each other until the moment they landed upon the moon. The battle soon turned towards a mad dash, on foot on the moon, with each side attempting to make runs at the crashed ship. The fighting went on for several hours, until two ships still fighting in the upper atmosphere crashed into each other and went down.   Somehow, they crashed directly into the downed craft in which the door still resided. Unfortunately, the crashed ships had compromised drives and exploded. Somehow, this was enough to splinter and destroy the VastReach Door.   The splintering led to something none have experienced before, or since, in the Delta Space. The complete and utter failure and combustion of an Abnormality Object. The energy released was so catastrophic that all matter on the moon was instantly vaporized — annihilated in an instant. What was left was the moon with a crater so deep it nearly went clean through to the other side.

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In the wake of the explosion, sitting at the center of the enormous crater was something new and even stranger than the VastReach Door.   A polished and deeply purple cube. With a vast universe's worth of energy swirling from deep within it. It was about the size of an Imperial palm, and it sat in the dust of the ruined moon at the bottom of the new crater. Immovable. Its mass, so immense that no man, machine, or otherwise could hope to possibly lift it.   Since the incident some years ago, people have certainly tried, both Lupine and Imperial alike. Conducting covert missions to sneak into the crater and try to abscond with the seemingly new material created fresh from the destruction of something thought to be immutable. But none have come close to succeeding. The block stubbornly stays firmly in place, not budging by an atom.   Nowadays, the moon is under the jurisdiction of the Imperials, and a small manned space station has been constructed to keep watch over the moon. And a small one-story facility was built on the edge of the moon’s crater to keep watch over the cube itself.   The cube’s mysteries remain elusive, and seem no more likely to be confirmed any time soon than the cube being moved itself. But of course, people have their theories on what the cube could be.