This is my first real post here, so it might be a little... all over the place. There's a lot to take in, so I guess I'll try and do things in a *relatively* chronological order.

Let's go ahead and assume that this universe operates within the same confines, laws of physics, as our own. Now, there are a few different terms to keep in mind in terms of existential scale. These are from smallest to largest.

Universe: In the sense of "observable universe," consists of the sum total of everything that comprises known space. Within the context of this world's narrative, there's a single universe - the one that performs the best with the fastest rates of progress and efficiency in terms of societal development, with a for-all-intents-and-purposes unlimited number of alternative Timelines.

Timeline: Essentially "alternate universe," that is, on a level above Universe - the plethora of 'verses in existence are characterized more by their chronology than actions in a statistical format. "Timeline where person X did action B instead of person Y doing action A" as opposed to "timeline where you never existed," for example. The defining characteristic of a given Timeline in a contextual conversation is the event or series of events of note that make the Timeline so different from another, rather than just defining a timeline by a stereotype or adjective.

Interim: Made up ante-space - pure clinical nothingness rather than dark matter, a vacuum, or some sort of anti-particle - the Interim is the existentially grey area between Timelines. It's hard to comprehend, but look at it this way: let's take a dictionary. Every character in the book is a universe, every definition a timeline. The air between the pages - that is, the physical absence, rather than a sort of negative space like the actual paper within the dictionary - is the Interim. Because ante-space is made of nothing, the time it takes to travel between two spaces separated by ante-space is instantaneous; exponentially quicker than the speed of light.

Reality: the sum total of all things, from universes to timelines to the Interim. Reality is laid out similar to an organic system made up of cells, but operates similarly to a conscious, functioning mind. For comprehension's sake, it can be viewed similarly to a two-dimensional pegboard with circular or semi-circular universes making up progressively larger and larger constructs like globules in a lava lamp. Universes can have infinitesimal overlaps like a Venn Diagram or be completely alone, and are sorted informally via context and coincidence just like trains of thought, emotions, and memories. Ante-space fills the gaps, representing lack of understanding, unknown information, and so on. Timelines can be forgotten, remembered, merged, implied, assumed, and consolidated in a variety of ways just like human thought processes. The overall "layout of reality" constantly evolves as a result. A few "population centers" where timeline clusters naturally flourish make up the bulk of realities with the Universe at the pseudo-center, while timelines on the verge of ending or being forgotten will gravitate towards the edges.

Overall, this elaborate existential network actually has little bearing on the main story, but has some important ties to it, so the makeup is worth noting. Now, let's switch focus to our main story's Universe. Throughout all of reality, black, white and gray choices are made. These have a variety of bearings on the Timeline itself, but ultimately affect the residents more so than the timeline itself, e.g. no single decision is going to irrevocably kill off or perfect the Timeline. However, making enough good choices can severely improve the quality of a given Timeline, with the single Universe essentially being the 99th percentile "poster child" that makes the highest amount of perfect decisions first.

Adding on to this, the Universe we focus on is mostly thanks to a single race known as the Sisterhood, binomial nomenclature Alcedo Halysis ("A Corona On The Past's Peace," lit. "Ideal Halo"). This particular race is actually the precursor race to the main characters, but their machinations are noteworthy. Skipping pages to the most pivotal development of theirs, the Sisterhood's next-to-perfect track record in terms of development meant they were the first race to fully understand Dark Energy. At this point, it's so far into the life of the universe that it's virtually incomprehensible if we were to try and relate using our year-based scale, and the full demystification of dark energy is the last domino for the Sisterhood before they literally know everything. In the real world, dark energy is a hypothetical, enigmatic quantity to the universe that makes up a substantial portion of the "negative space" in existence, essentially accounting for the mass of the universe tangible matter and dark matter can't account for on their own in order to keep our measurements correct with regards to universal statistics. As the Sisterhood discovers, this is because dark energy is a one-of-a-kind quantifiable state known as "anticorvet." In other words, its measurable quantities are actually *variable* rather than being set in stone like every other compound in existence. That is, while some things are variable, anticorvet is the x or n in an equation to the defined numbers of the rest of the universe. Or rather, "anticorvet = x + 1," reverberating off the energy of the universe in such a fashion that its existence is pure perpetual motion and creation of energy. Picture a terrarium full of sponges that gets filled up with water. As the water begins to fill up space, it continues to push out until no space remains, permeating sponges, ground and the like until it overflows. Anticorvet operates on a similar principle, essentially saturating matter and flowing outward based on the energy it levels out with and then one-ups following material contact. This is why the universe is constantly expanding and did not reach a point of dilution, stasis or degeneration in the first few billion years as (theorized) to be the case with our universe.

After nailing down the statistical data on anticorvet, it allows for the Sisterhood to be the first race in reality to invent and utilize faster-than-light travel, albeit in a much more impractical fashion than most sci-fi universes usually employ. Much like how "LASER" was originally an acronym, FTL travel is known as Seceding in-universe, from the acronym "SECEDE." Short for "Scattershot Emissive Conical Extrapolation of Dark Energy," seceding is specifically performed by Suspense Drives within starships or star-faring constructs. How it works is similar to a break shot in billiards with the starship itself being the eight-ball: the starship unleashes timed charges operating on nuclear fusion and furthermore caked in dark energy and begins by activating the "initiator charge" or cueball tailing the starship. This prompts the controlled, conical expansion of dark energy toward the ship and likewise initiates the remaining charges in a cascade. The starships aren't actually moving faster than light in the typical definition of speed, but rather are riding the wakes of artificially-induced expansion of the universe, as a result. Seceding requires pinpoint measurements to avoid pushing too much spatial negative space out of space, however, because the artificial redshift and blueshift are just as pivotal to the constant expansion of the universe as the real thing. "Natural" dark energy operates surprisingly organically, and seceding can cause malevolent wakes, ripples, etc. in universal growth if ill-timed.

Because these FTL jumps are accelerating outward in a way that disregards the natural expansion of the universe, however, it means that with patience and enough resources the Sisterhood could realistically catch up to the end of the expanding universe before space actually exists there. With the Sisterhood being as old as they were, the idea of waiting even millions of years was harmless to them, especially now that they had refuted the notion that the universe would naturally kill itself somehow. The Sisterhood had gotten cocky; they were about to start coloring outside the lines on an existential scale.

In the grand scheme of things, this was their first real mistake.

As part of an unprecedented project, the Sisterhood began planning to secede to the edges of the universe and see what exactly lay outside the lines. This is where ante-space and timelines come in. When the Sisterhood reached the end of the Universe and found statistical nothingness, to their amazement ante-space ("before space") operated as it did, instantaneously feeding them into a neighboring timeline. At this level of maturity, the concept of war was completely alien to a species like the Sisterhood. Not out of some existential nirvana, but simply because they were so advanced even the second-best race in Reality was still only reaching roughly 63rd percentile. They were untouchable. This allowed them to passively transcend timelines and antespace alike just as the pioneers of old did in the frontier, until eventually the Sisterhood had such a strong grasp on the networking layout of all of Reality that they literally mapped out the full extent of existential comprehension the way we wrote maps, made globes.

While for the sake of demonstration I specifically noted "reality" looking something like a 2D diagram of a cell network, in reality it's operating on levels of comprehension a human couldn't begin to understand. The layout spans dimensions beyond third; beyond Euclidean, even. However, it's worth noting reality is fully closed-circle with regards to its layout; there are no dead ends, no wrong turns, no true edges or corners. It simply *is*, an organic fractal-like lattice the likes of which we'll probably never fully grasp. There's no way for new materials to enter reality and no way for them to exit; even dead and forgotten timelines get folded over, tucked away or repurposed in new and developing ones. Conservation of matter and energy still hold true in the grand scheme of things. Chronometric human-perceived "time" and the time by which the Timelines get their namesake are two very different things, with the latter being fairly parallel to space; not so different, but never overlapping.

All in all, the Sisterhood is a remarkable race for making it this far and surviving. Their feats are nothing short of impossible. However, reality never forgets and seldom forgives, and ultimately seceding begins to catch up with them. Though thought to be harmless in their calculated states of deployment, suspense drives begin to leave wakes, ripples and tears in the abstract makeup of reality. Individual timelines start crumpling under their own weight in such a fashion that even antespace is seemingly aggravated and becomes injected through timelines until some are outright isolated from all neighbor timelines (known as an "orphaned timeline, " the most common type at this point), irreparably contorting the makeup of reality. When communications are established with the patron Universe, they discover that even it has suffered some damage. After lengthy discussion, the Sisterhood pinpoints that the negative consequences began the second they left their Universe and grazed antespace, and it is at that point something frightening washes over the species: for the first time in billions, potentially trillions of years, the Sisterhood was wrong about something. They had made a mistake, an anomaly the likes of which their race had never seen.

It is instantly following this realization that all members of the Sisterhood receive an identical message, transcending tongues, instantly regardless of time or place in reality - a feat impossible even for them, albeit they are a notably patient people.

"You were not wrong. You made all the right choices. You were perfect.

And that is why we have decided your story is at an end."

And in that moment, suddenly, the bulk of antespace took on a quality resembling that of matter in contact with antimatter - a violent unraveling with a startlingly high efficiency, but still flawed with markedly human error. Any Sisterhood platforms attempting antespace navigation at the time died instantly, and contact between all timelines not intertwined were lost; the orphaned timelines were then calculatedly wiped out one by one until a small remnant of the Universe and a few splinters of satellite timelines remained. Reality, existence, had lost over 99% of its being in just thirteen years - the blink of an eye for a member of the Sisterhood.

It's unknown why the remaining universe survived for as long as it did. Perhaps it was because it was considered nonthreatening. Indeed, this portion of reality now housed only a single Sister: an imaginative type by name of (roughly, roughly romanized) His Luminiferous Quintesce. The real name is something to the effect of Hjs Iymnfrjs Cnmnyntss, meaning "the antithesis to a numerical subterfuge." Sisterhood naming schemes are pretty alien compared to ours. The Quintesce's major accomplishment in life was the creation of Halcyon's Law, a formula devised to account for and eliminate all instances of entropy in a closed system. It was as common in Sisterhood methodology as Pi in our own, being the lynchpin for suspense drive calculations and the like. Because the Sisterhood thought they had reached a point of omniscience as a society, it was used in their reality in an attempt to become perfectly calculated. And, indeed, it held correct until the massacres followed. Those thirteen years would come to be known by the Sisterhood, or rather the now lone Quintesce as The Unknown War.

With limited time and resources before the Unknown - whom, surprisingly, had yet to employ faster-than-light travel of mass despite mastering instantaneous communication - would arrive in the area, the Quintesce took initiative. Accounting for all of the remaining resources in the universe, he started developing concepts for a self-sustaining Dysonesque installation known as an inverse-world - a megalithic construct capable of sustaining life with the surface or crust making up the interior walls and an artificial star at the center. However, despite by-the-numbers application of Halcyon's Law, the project was seemingly fruitless. Even with implementation of anticorvet for integrity's sake, the mockups were proving unstable. It is at that point the Quintesce realized a critical error, one so blatant he wondered how his race had missed it: if laws of conservation of matter and energy were never broken in the universe, how did dark energy not have a polar opposite? A corvet, so to speak? It must have been a test, he thought. At a certain point, the Sisterhood must have been intended to reverse-engineer anticorvet and synthesize an anti-anticorvet as a sort of final test of character.

Not letting the loss of his Sisters go unfounded, he quickly fashioned a skunkworks element known as Corvetium (pronounced "core-viddium"), or colloquially Aether. In contrast to the "x + 1" function of anticorvet, Aether functioned as "ae + x = 1," with ae representing Aether and x representing the elements, energies or compounds of choice. It was, in essence, a way to smooth out the corners, add a proverbial reverb - a way to fill the subtle vulnerabilities in compounds and, in layman's terms, realize the true potential of everything it touched. To use the original sponge-terrarium analogy, pouring aether-water into the terrarium would not affect the open air, but strengthen the terrarium itself and fill the sponge until it was perfectly integral and impenetrable.

In the updated tests, the inverse-world proved stable, but he would have to mask its subtle emissions to avoid drawing attention to himself, still fearful of the unknown. That is why the inverse-world was chosen as a base - to provide a closed system where Halcyon's Law would prove effective beyond a shadow of a doubt. And indeed it did: a sort of perpetual motion time machine known as a Duality Matrix fueled by Sisterhood technology and the subatomic collisions of anticorvet and Aether allowed the project to be fully constructed almost instantaneously. In addition, it allowed for full access of navigable space and time to be accessible within the inverse-world's shell - at least, available to the Quintesce.

His next challenge would be utilizing the space to develop either a counterattack or an impenetrable means of defense. Based on the minimal intelligence he possesed regarding the Unknown, they were a puzzling sort - absolutely alien with remarkably inefficient biology, and their decisions were spurred by motivations the Quintesce could not begin to comprehend. It all seemed like a sick joke. And yet... these anomalous qualities were the very reason the Sisterhood fell. The Quintesce got an idea. He'd do what hadn't been done by his race since the last act of secession, the last suspense drive jump - he'd take a risk.

In fact, he'd define the citizens of the inverse-world by risk. Rather than sticking to the knowledgeable, premeditated and calculated standards set by the Sisterhood, he'd make them emotional, impulsive and cunning - the same bizarre traits employed by the Unknown. He began nailing down three core principles by which the world would live: harmonics, minimalism, and modernism. Rather than shoot for blatant and iconic (as in melodic), his people would be a tightly-knit, resonant sort. Rather than be perpetually technical and oversaccharine or baroque, they would be succinct in their lethality. And rather than stick to classics and comfort, he would ensure they made strides of progression and innovation, rather than stagnate like, in hindsight, his race did. These three principles also allowed him to come up with a name for the world: Trinity.

As he faced the last few minutes before he would switch the Duality Matrix from standby to active, spontaneously sparking life into the world and concurrently granting him the knowledge of all Trinity is and ever will be, he pondered. It was an act the Sisterhood rarely stopped to do. If they had formulated Aether before they tried seceding, would it have ever gotten to this point? If the Unknown were watching that whole time, would they have approved if the Sisterhood had made more mistakes? If in the end, the Sisterhood went extinct, was a perfect race simply never meant to be?

It didn't matter, His Luminiferous Quintesce thought to himself. Saying goodbye to reason and hello to impulse - know thy enemy - he took another step forward and flipped the switch.