History of Solus

 In the beginning, Earth died. Like rats fleeing a sinking ship, hundreds of colony ships launched from the dead world into the emptiness of the void. There were as many backers and movements as there were ships, each bound by their own ideologies. Most have never been heard from since the exodus. Of the handful whose fates were known, only one concerns us right now.

Providence
The Providence was owned by a corporate entity that has since become so ubiquitous and monolithic as to be only remembered as The Company. While ostensibly a cryoship, lacking good AI it was necessary to wake up an engineering and maintenance staff on a regular basis.

The journey into the void is fraught with misfortune, almost as if the ship was cursed. Systems broke down continuously, and eventually, the course was lost, leading the ship to wander lost in the void for centuries longer than expected. The maintenance crew burned through multiple lifetimes despite the cryogenic freezing, eventually passing on their understanding to a new generation of engineers, and then another. By the time the Providence arrived the engineering crew had gone through so many generations the practice of waking from cryo to repair the ship was as much a religious ritual as routine. Thus the religion of Enginism was born.

Solus
Upon arriving in the Solus system the Providence found few habitable worlds. Instead, during their brief awakening, the board of directors concocted a plan for terraforming the various planets and moons of the system that could be made habitable. To do this onerous work the board did not seek volunteers nor did they forcibly enlist their passenger cargo. Instead, they used old Earth technology to genetically engineer a generation of human-animal hybrids designed to handle the difficult conditions on the planet.

It took over a thousand years of hard labor and oversight of temperamental machinery to finally make the worlds of Solus habitable. In that time the chimera sent down to serve as first-generation colonists had largely relegated their origins to half-forgotten myth. They had settled in the best lands their terraforming could create and remained vaguely in touch across the void between worlds with half-functional ancient technology. When The Company returned looking to take what they claimed to own it was a shock to the chimera. Sadly the early conflicts between the chimera and The Company were often woefully one-sided in favor of the Spaceborne Company.

Awakening
The colonists were not awakened all at once. Instead, the Company men were the first out of the cryotubes. The first thing they did was unleash hell upon the chimera who resisted their takeover using technological superiority. Then they proceeded to pick the best of the terraformed worlds for their own use, taking those most useful to them to their new paradise of Persephone.

When the rest of the colonists were awoken they found themselves scattered amongst the other planets and moons of the Solus system. Most were forcibly funnelled to the desert world of Perdition, easily the largest of the habitable worlds even if it was only barely hospitable.

 Discovery
There was a lot to learn for the new colonists. Imagine if you will, finding yourself abandoned in a barely livable desert and told you’re unspeakably in debt to an overwhelmingly powerful company. Then imagine that becomes the least of your problems when you’re confronted with ghosts, ghouls, and spirits of all sorts. The early years of the colony were a riot of madness and destruction as the colonists struggled to deal with their new ectoplasmic neighbors.

Then considered the added upheaval and chaos brought about with the discovery of magic. It was a weak thing at first, chaotic and barely understood. Ghostly guns, divine gifts of the holy engine, necromancy, nothing seemed too improbable. Many people, raised on an atheistic dying Earth, found their core beliefs shaken and fled to the warm steady embrace of Enginism.

Of most interest to the company however was the new black gold, ectonite. The strange metal was discovered in and around ancient alien ruins and had impossible properties. Soon The Company was ruthlessly organizing mining and archeology sites to extract ectonite and study the ruins they were associated. It was back-breaking labor often associated with frequent ghost attacks but this was of little concern for the company.

Today
It's been over two hundred years since the awakening. Things have stabilized a bit. The Company has consolidated its power even more, its leaders practicing dark forbidden arts using ectonite. The best of old Earth technology isn't available to the common man, with many forced to rely on more primitive weapons such as ballistic guns, and many people have worked with the same old temperamental pieces of equipment for generations. Regardless, the black gold has unlocked new technological wonders, enabling formerly impossible magitech, and even being used in circuitry to create the first truly self-aware AI. The job of Undertaker has become common across the Solus system and there's good pay to be found in ghost hunting.