THE BEGINNING

Someplace in the deep recesses of the Ship a cathode ray tube clicks and pops several times and then flares into glowing green warmth. 

Esoteric numbers skitter across a curved glass surface thick with the microscopic detritus of centuries long past. But these numbers do themselves not necessarily matter. It's what they're *doing* that matters. 

Sequences of ancient codes and scrawls of commands cascade faster and faster now; the furious incantations of a long dead creator. The acrid stink of boiling capacitors and shorted out electrical components fill the small dank oubliette. A relay snaps closed with a resounding CLACK! as complex gearing, thick with centuries old cosmoline and caked grease, begin to turn to their single purpose. More machine noises begin to churn, buzz and whir in the Hibernaculum as it stirs it's lonely slumbering inhabitant to life...

The sleeper has awoken.

The Realm the Ship is simple for most - subsistence farming for some, salvage and trade for others. Many resort to savagery as the horrors of the dark become increasingly unavoidable.

The remnants of settlements built upon the bones of cities, themselves planted on the forgotten buttresses and brute iron deckplates of a Ship whose meaning and purpose is now long lost to time, perhaps never to be fulfilled. Vast nuclear reactors burn on unchecked via automated systems, with cracked coolant lines the width of schoolbuses pouring their contamination throughout the Ship. Technology consists of what can be found, or built. 

Not much is built anymore, save for knapped uranium glass tools and crude machining. Some organic chemistry, mycology, animal husbandry. It is needed. Many things are needed. The few simple pleasures of life diminish and fade, while the dangers of the farthest forgotten reaches of the ship draw ever nearer.

Primordial and secretive R+D sectors buried in the bowels of the Ship run rampant centuries ago, have at long last borne their putrescent and overripe fruit.