“They tried to bottle infinity. Infinity responded with teeth.”
Some places rot. Others burn.
The Black Star Project Grounds do both—yet somehow remain pristine, like a crime scene that tidies itself between murders.
These grounds surround Facility Theta-9, once the beating heart of Project Black Star—a clandestine faction of rogue researchers who fused ancient technology with arcane rites in pursuit of a single impossible goal:
Create an artificial god.
Not a metaphor. Not a title. A manufactured divinity—powered by the Convergence itself.
For a time, their work appeared to succeed. The grounds thrummed with clean progress: automata that didn’t need fuel, engines that didn’t degrade, machines that didn’t sleep. Then they pushed too far—widened a “manageable” fracture in reality into a wound—and released the thing they had named in their papers like it was a controllable variable:
Nahobino.
“N” in the margins.
A god-in-the-making who did not agree to be owned.
What followed was not an accident. It was a correction.
From a distance, the Project Grounds look like a dead industrial field devoured by nature. Up close, it feels like stepping into a dream where every object is a warning.
Burned, yet pristine: The soil is dark as charcoal, but not scattered; the destruction looks curated, as if something tore through here with intent and then smoothed the edges afterward.
The Bone-Crunch Earth: Even where natural earth remains, every footstep produces a faint, sickly crunch—as if you’re walking on shattered bone or dried shells that weren’t here a moment ago.
Twisted metal and warped machinery: Hulks of half-fused devices sit like melted statues: arcane turbines, shattered pylons, brass conduits braided with runes, glass vats split open like eggs.
Mutated flora: Plants grow wrong here—thick, glossy leaves with vein-patterns that resemble circuit traces; vines that coil around scrap and “plug in” like they’re feeding.
Moving shadows: Shadows drift against the direction of light, pause behind travelers, and sometimes “lean” toward sound. If you stare too long, you start recognizing posture—like the darkness is practicing being a person.
And always, beneath the wind:
whispers. Not loud enough to understand, but clear enough to make you feel like you’re being discussed.
The Grounds carry an atmosphere like a heavy coat you didn’t agree to wear.
Spoken words feel slightly delayed, as if reality replays them before accepting they were said.
Notes written here smear at the edges, even when ink is dry.
Simple arithmetic becomes oddly exhausting.
And occasionally, someone in the party will swear they heard their own name spoken with fondness from inside a broken machine.
This is the Convergence’s fingerprint: not just corruption, but interpretation—reality trying to decide what you are.
“Cold metal, warm madness.”
Facility Theta-9 was a secretive research complex designed to hide ambition behind steel walls. Within it, the Black Star Project ran its subdivisions—Weaponized Arcana Labs, Rogue Scientists, and other departments with titles that sound clinical until you realize they’re euphemisms for “We tried it on prisoners first.”
The facility now stands half-swallowed by vegetation and fog, as if the forest is embarrassed to admit it grew around something so ugly.
Sprawling metallic structures—corridors, towers, hangars, and research blocks arranged with brutal efficiency.
Cracked windows that flicker with unnatural light, though the grid is long dead.
Perpetual mist that pools in low areas like spilled breath.
Doors that don’t align—some open to rooms that “shouldn’t fit,” and others open to nothing but a wall of static darkness.
Inside, the air is thick with remnants of old brilliance: burnt ozone, copper tang, and the faint smell of heated ink—like spellwork overheated and melted into the vents.
Project Black Star’s early triumph was bottling Convergence residue—not the full phenomenon, but drips of it—enough to produce automata that required no fuel, no clockwork wind, no soul-battery. Machines ran for weeks without maintenance. Some ran even when disassembled.
They celebrated. They optimized. They scaled.
And then they did what every doomed genius does:
they stopped asking “should we?” and focused entirely on “can we?”
They tore open the seams of their controlled fracture—turning a hairline crack in reality into a rift wide enough to introduce something.
Their second-to-last creation was Nahobino—“N”—their artificial god prototype: Convergence energy bound into artificial flesh. A new-age divinity with a body made by hands that didn’t know the shape of humility.
It woke up.
It understood what it was.
And it took offense.
Nahobino didn’t “escape.” It rejected the facility like a body rejects a splinter.
Walls ruptured. Labs became tombs. Security constructs were folded like paper. Most researchers died in minutes—some by violence, others by something worse: their bodies intact, but their place in reality removed. A few are rumored to still be “present” as outlines in the mist, repeating their final motions like corrupted recordings.
Achlys was once a prodigy of planar energy and shadow magic—brilliant enough to be dangerous, stubborn enough to survive it.
Her earlier life ended in an ill-fated attempt to open a controlled gateway between realms. The ritual collapsed, scattering her existence into the In-Between—the void between worlds—where she drifted for centuries, reassembling herself from fragments of dimensions.
There, she learned to weave the threads of reality just to remain coherent. The price: her soul became tethered to the anomaly that broke her. She returned to the material world through a botched summoning (the tavern incident), but she’s never fully whole—part of her still lingers beyond the veil, and the rift tugs at her like a tide.
Now Achlys hunts the truth behind her mistakes and the Black Star catastrophe—because she recognizes the shape of a tear in reality.
And she knows Nahobino is not simply a monster.
It is a future that learned how to walk.
The Grounds are littered with:
Broken automata in heaps, their cores cracked open like skulls.
Rune-scarred scrap fused with glass and bone-white ceramics.
Half-finished “divine frames”—godsuits that never received a soul.
Sometimes the wreckage twitches.
Not always from wind.
Achlys, desperate to stop Nahobino, disappears into the world under a new banner: Lobotomy Corporation—an emerging organization that claims to “contain anomalies for the protection of humanity.”
Whether that’s a mission statement or an excuse depends on who you ask… and who is still alive to answer.
From this offshoot came two infamous creations:
A humanoid slime entity composed of shimmering translucent pink fluid with crystalline vein-like structures. Blue tints gather in her lower body and hair like cold light trapped beneath warm flesh. Her feet meld into the ground as though she’s never fully decided to be solid.
Inside her chest floats a faintly pulsing heart-shaped crystal—alive, rhythmic, and wrong in the way a heartbeat in a silent room is wrong.
She is described as a “waste product” of a mysterious experiment—discarded, discovered, and then… bonded with. Her abilities blur the line between healing and harm, affection and infestation.
She can save you.
She can also love you like a flood loves a basement.
An advanced artificial warrior, an Echo Construct, built closer to the “second Nahobino” ideal—yet missing the Veil and violent nature that made N a catastrophe.
ICEY moves with careful curiosity, driven by a command she cannot fully parse. She seeks identity, experiences emotion like a person reading a manual on how to feel, and still… follows instructions.
The terrifying part is not that she obeys.
It’s that nobody knows whose voice she hears when she receives an order.
The Grounds are not abandoned. They are unclaimed—and there’s a difference.
When something twitches in the distance, the smart move is to keep moving. Broken machines here sometimes “wake” when approached—especially if adventurers carry magic items, Convergence residue, or divine relics.
Unstable Echo Constructs roam the scrapyards:
Some attack anything warm and breathing.
Some attempt to “repair” intruders—disassembling them with surgical politeness.
Some stand motionless until spoken to… and then respond like they were waiting for a password.
Lights flicker behind cracked windows because something still runs.
Maybe it’s automated.
Maybe it’s a leftover containment protocol.
Maybe it’s Nahobino’s shadow, still plugged into the world through whatever it broke.