Galactic Sectors

'It is quite the surprise to see you, dazed traveler. This is your year, but it doesn’t look like you’re from around here. There’s a lot of deadly worlds out there, and it wouldn’t be kind to let a stranger go blind out into that big wide Winter Street.'

Sector Solar
[Sector Solar pertains to an Older Build of Orchard of Rising Lights and no longer Exists]

The smallest of the sectors, its importance is justified by its density of colonies and population as well as its relevance in humanity’s history. When the meteor responsible for the Gardener Exodus collided with Earth seven thousand years ago, their foresight was not enough to warn them that the local worlds would also be unsustainable. As such, the Gardener ruins in Sector Solar are lesser than in more distant systems, but these were the worlds claimed first by humanity reaching for the sky two hundred years ago. They represent the bold dreams of a newly empowered people, and their cities contain magnificent wonders of architecture and bustling, thundering societies. You will have to travel for many thousands of light years indeed to escape the influence of the Solar Worlds. The Solar Worlds are:


 * Ganymede, hub of Sector Solar
 * Mars
 * Io
 * Mercury
 * Venus
 * Pluto
 * Oberon

Despite this relative density of population, there is much that remains unknown about the solar worlds, and evidence that the Gardeners left more behind here than modern witches know. Venus and the Gas Giants particularly are proving difficult to understand, even after we have come so far.

Only those who are willing to submit fully to the will of the planet can last for long on Earth. As a result, most humans chose to make a new life out on the Portal Network.

Sector Sentinel
Out around the Orion Nebula and along a wide band of worlds local to Sol, explorers mapping the portal network found far grander Gardener cities than within the solar system. These were all worlds terraformed to support human life, tending towards expansive grassy plains and curious rock formations. Many were still home to magically divergent descendants of Earth fauna, even though none of these worlds had any humans to be found.

The Sentinel Worlds proved a bracing frontier for early travellers on the portal network, a seemingly endless treasure trove of gardener artifacts and new exotic wildlife. People reached for these worlds in the thousands upon thousands, and they are now home to many independent cities, some almost rivaling Mars or Ganymede in influence. Sailor’s Vision, the unofficial headquarters of the Faculty, is located on Oparyllian, a Sentinel World, rather than in the Sector Solar. These masters of learning wished to distance themselves from the rambling swashbuckling madness that Sector Solar had become in the first decades of portal exploration. Faculty branches on independent worlds are technically independent in turn, but a request from Sailor’s Vision is rarely refused. Oparyllian is also known for producing particularly fine horses.

The Sentinel Worlds are:


 * Oparyllian, hub of Sector Sentinel
 * Cobalt
 * Angel Basin
 * Eleven Other settled worlds
 * An Unknown Number of former Ancestral Gardener worlds

Sector Serpent
The farthest entry in the network at Ganymede’s Wheel and Shine Crossroads on Mars is a star roughly 16,000 light years from Sol, in the constellation Cassiopeia, some way around the milky way. It is thought to be the furthest visible star to the unaided human eye from Earth, and as a result historians believe that Ancestral Gardeners settled it to establish a new frontier out into the rest of the galaxy with the hub city on a world that now bears the name of that constellation.

The hub at Cassiopeia connects to many worlds unreachable from the Solar and Sentinel sectors, but they are often unkind to humans. Disasters of nature and terraforming have rendered environments inhospitable, and what little fortifications remain of gardener habitation often prove more dangerous still. A community thrives on Cassiopeia, and has its own approach to the Serpent Worlds, but most sane persons choose not to linger long in these territories. Some of the worlds in Sector Serpent are home to an alien species called the Chase. They have been compared to wide-eared rodents standing as tall as six feet. They are a starfaring species and some of them are magical; encounters with them have been both amiable and deadly.

The Serpent Worlds are:


 * Cassiopeia, hub of Sector Serpent
 * Four Other settled worlds
 * Violin Cry, site of catastrophic magical disaster and the Locked Portal To Another Galaxy
 * An Unknown Number of former Ancestral Gardener worlds, many centuries-doomed
 * An Unknown Number of worlds thought to be Chase home worlds

Sector Garden
On the far side of the core from Earth is a star system so bright it can be seen from Cassiopeia, even though it's merely a few thousand light-years from the core's edge. This Triple-O star system is called Brilliant Waltz, and the city at Brilliant Waltz has a far bigger network even than Ganymede’s Wheel.

The worlds on this network shame Sector Sentinel with their beauty and depth of Gardener history. Sector Garden, or the Greater Garden as some call it, is host to hundreds of overgrown jungle worlds with vast abandoned megalopolises nestled in harmony with the wilderness. None would dare to suggest we are even close to unraveling the secrets that the Greater Garden has to offer, as new worlds are discovered along the network almost every day and the Gardener megastructures already discovered could enthrall scholars for lifetimes. Something clearly happened to the Gardeners, and maybe somewhere here is the key to what that was.

Travel to Sector Garden from Sector Solar used to necessitate passing through Cassiopeia, but with the construction of Horizons Cross beyond Pluto there is a direct line between the two most prosperous arms of humanity. Folks living in the Greater Garden tend to be more easygoing than folks from closer to humanity’s home, and their cities, while still heavily developed, are much less busy.

Their hub is the exception: Brilliant Waltz is always extremely lively and explorers and settlers are always reaching out into the Garden. God could only guess at how many frontier towns and even larger settlements have been established in these blooming wonderlands. The Garden Worlds are:


 * Brilliant Waltz, hub of Sector Garden
 * Thoth
 * Amethyst
 * Scorpion
 * Hobgoblin
 * Twenty Two Other settled worlds
 * A Dizzyingly Vast Number of former Ancestral Gardener worlds

Sector Midnight
The last great hub on the Gardener Network is a city named Midnight, on the dark side of a world called Midnight, which constantly shows one face to its nova sun. Sector Midnight stretches off the farthest side of the galaxy, and is nowhere close to being fully understood.

While humans have reclaimed Midnight, whose atmosphere has been altered to safely support terrestrial life and has been watched over by Emperor Toucans and Moon Frogs, the other worlds in Sector Midnight are far bleaker places. Some call this region Devastated Space, for all remnants of Gardener civilisation aren’t just abandoned, they were forcibly destroyed and the landscapes show signs of conflict, still stalked by violent fauna. This is a curious frontier, riddled with an unplaceable stench of death, and one that many have little time for, but of course Sector Midnight holds secrets unknowable anywhere else. The Midnight Worlds are:


 * Midnight
 * Barrow Zen
 * Hawkmoth
 * Six Other settled worlds
 * An Unknown Number of former Ancestral Gardener Worlds

A coalition of alien races known as the Crystal Curtain claim many of the worlds found in Sector Midnight, off the Gardeners' network. Their ships were first seen around Brilliant Waltz over a hundred years ago, but contact has only been established over the last few decades. The Curtain has implied it holds control of worlds far far beyond the scope of Sector Midnight.

The Crystal Curtain has claimed ignorance of what befell the Gardeners, and truth witches have believed them. They do seem distrustful of humans, and some of their cities discovered on the network feature anti-magic effects.

The Galactic Core
In the region around Sagittarius A*, the black hole in the center of Vintergatan, the star density is four million per cubic parsec. For context, a parsec is roughly 3.3 light years, and that density is seventy five million times greater than the region around the Solar System. It is the most dense area of stars in the entire galaxy, with still massive density of stellar bodies for thousands of light years around. This presents problems for navigation.

Cosmic interference from the stars renders travel via portal or ship impossible with any safety, and no other species has been known to have technology that circumvents these difficulties. The Core is apparently impassable, but this does not stop the Faculty from trying - on the edge of the Core is a world called Dragon, where Gaians live among supposed relics of Ancestral Gardeners attempting to pass the same problem. They have successfully created a portal to a world a hundred or so light years deeper into the core, which they proudly named Infinity Breach, but thanks to the rotation of objects in space and the problems of this region they can visit it only rarely.

The Galactic Core is either the most pressing problem on a witch's mind, or something they tend to barely think of.