Thread:Cy-Fox/@comment-34754462-20180426232432/@comment-1050677-20180427030657

[handrubbing of glee] All right, so there's going to be a little bit of history and world-building explained here. Mobius (now Kepler-22B in the current draft) and Earth had a bit of a dependency of sorts on each other. While time-wise it was 2012 or so (according to our calendar), Mobius was dominated by a Kingdom of Acorn that was reminiscent of Imperial Germany in World War I.

The Kingdom at this time had tried to take the Chaos and Master Emeralds from the echidnas guarding them. However there was a sort of "anti-theft" system so to speak that went into play. Floating Island was destroyed, sinking the Master Emerald into the ocean and the Chaos Emeralds disappeared. This event kicked off a decades long war between echidnas allying with minor powers and the Kingdom.

Where did the Emeralds end up? Earth, somehow whether by 'programming' or sentience with the emerald system. When tested by the scientific community, it was found that they were providing enough power to the Large Hadron Collider to create and sustain a wormhole.

Mind you, a wormhole on the surface of a planet is a dangerous prospect. I did a great deal of physics research in my redesign. The technology that this opened up had great potential to change the balance of power in both the economy and military purpose. Nominally, since the Emeralds were all found in US territory, they belonged to the U.S. government. Everything was being kept quiet until Obama decided it was time to involve the private sector.

In the update, there may still be an allusion to this time.

From my notes: "Research efforts were expanded as social democratic factions took center stage in key nations of the United States (Sanders), Canada (Trudeau), United Kingdom (Cable) France (Macron), Switzerland (Levrat), Germany (Schulz) and Japan (Edano) starting around 2014. Russia would take longer to turn towards the ideology as economic sanctions and protests worked to tear down the power of Vladimir Putin and United Russia. Of particular interest, illegal campaign contributions and attempted cyberwarfare in US federal elections conducted by Russia, including an attempt to throw heavy support behind an 'outsider' candidate known as a reality TV star and real estate 'mogul' failed miserably, resulting in further tightening of sanctions.

As those factions continued to ride on with acclaim, cooperation to create a larger, permanent replacement for the International Space Station began. This station would also be a testbed for maintaining a community in orbit as well as providing a platform for advanced research, including that into the Chaos Emeralds. The new station, known as Space Station ARK would be completed by 2040 and later a special reactor meant to harness the Emeralds' combined energy would come online, providing reserve power in case the station's fusion reactors failed. Through a special focusing system, the wormhole originally created on the ground at the Large Hadron Collider was brought back online and studied. Unmanned probes would provide navigational data that would fix their position to be in the Kepler-22 system. A crucial test utilizing the last of the American Space Shuttles would pass both in unmanned and manned mission profiles."