1.03-Clouds of Regina

Get the Soundtrack ⁠here⁠: [Transcript]Nebula Regina. It’s a colorful and vibrant quadrant. If you want to get to the Magi, that’s your only door. Odo Lenses can't penetrate the helium and hydrogen so you have to go slow. Visibility is blind and your sensors are worse. Intuition is your best friend in there. And fear.Local wisdom credits all the lost pilgrim ships to pirates, marauders, and occultists hiding in those elemental folds. I don’t think many people realize the Regina has claimed as many of them as the pilgrims reaching for their precious Magi.I’ve only made the run three times over the millennia. It’s quiet inside the nebula, undulating waves of background radiation, static, and paranoia. There’s something to your left, but of course there isn’t. Behind you is the faintest of pings on the sensors, but it’s only a glitch. You hear voices in the static on your coms, and strange feelings come through if you tap the psychic stream. Then comes the Second Fold.Regina has two layers. The first is easy enough if you don’t lose your nerve. Between is a gap of maybe six hundred kilometers. Star light, UV, infrared, gamma, can't get through. The only time I can turn my radio on and not even static plays. You’re on your own for the next part. Grey and brown, it falls like rain down from Linear Y; a wall of silt in a river and you’re one unlucky fish.You push through and then you feel nothing. A numbness. You step down inside the veil, your self awareness leaves you. You’re a body in a tin can with a few extra tricks floating through dark sludge. And you’re not alone. Asteroids pass by in the murky space littered with vitro-plastic shrapnel. Flotsam and jetsam. From the craters something grows. They’re shapes mostly. Large, amorphous things. Bulbous and tendrilled.The commune on Zai claims they’re part of the Magi’s garden. Magi don’t have a garden. On the other side of Regina is a dusty planet full of fossils piled high with the bones of pilgrims, the skulls of their mystics saints at the base.