The nurse with pale white skin tried her best to comfort her patient crying in agony. The great Orestesi - or Lovelings, as they called their race, once divided through war between the great empires of Spurius, Mariniara, and Antiochus (each named after their capital city), had banded together in the final months to treat a massive epidemic of radiation disease. Each thought it was from a different cause, whether it be from the divine gods or from the gods of science.
But the nurse would soon halt her attempts, because the long, neverending beep of the EKG would be replaced with the roaring of a rocket. She walked to the window, and saw a long cylinder aimed toward the blue dot in the night sky. And there was her - no, not only her, but all Orestesi - salvation. On that rocket were the first Orestesi soldiers destined to take a new planet for themselves.
July 2, 3339
Greater Isthmus of Orestes
The Greater Isthmus of Orestes wasn't really an isthmus at all. Just more city. Today, however, the local spaceport had just gotten the reports from a robot probe sent to the galactic center. It took nearly 26,000 years for the reports to return, but even so, nearly infinite knowledge about the galaxy had been recieved at that one moment. The probe was instructed to send it's images as it sensed it would be sucked into the theorized black hole at the center of the galaxy (none earlier), and, sure enough, it had. The images of a distorted cloud of dust were the last that were recieved, but those were even more spectacular than those of globular clusters, red giants, and white dwarfs. For the first time, the Orestesi had actually reached a black hole - and that was incredible.
