When the outside world became hostile to our creed and our kin of past ages knew that they could not engage and change it, our ancestors chose to separate themselves from the outsiders. They went past the edges of civilization and built places of their own. Strength did not remain amongst them to fight back the decay that was consuming the whole world. Courage abandoned our fathers and, when they fled to build the Pax districts, our ancestors knew that they were retreating in defeat.

Pax Christos grew into a vast suburb containing five parishes of three conservative denominations. People came from all the places that they were made to feel unwelcome. Our kind regrouped in that generation, living in free air where we did not have to hide ourselves from public sight. All that we asked of the world was a place of our own. Peace was the aim of all the Pax districts all over the world.

But, the outsiders would not leave us even that much. Our dwelling places did not welcome the outsiders to the exclusion of us. We spoke our minds where all could hear, teaching our own values to our children. The outsiders drove us from our homes and we fled even further. This time we went into the poisoned wastelands where none would follow us.

200 and more miles northward through rugged terrain where no life could get a foothold, we came upon the lake that we call Avarice. Nearly a thousand of us made it over the cliffs to the island we named Omega where the life giving waters of Lake Zoe sustained them. There, we found a thing that had no name and yet was salvation to us. It was a yellow green dome, half a mile in diameter sunk into the stone of the island and ringed by seven white pyramids. Each of the seven pyramids stood 10 stories high and was capped by a red dome nine feet in diameter. We found no openings in any of these structures.

In four generations, we have learned nothing of the builders of the station some of us named Alpha. Workways allowed the first generation to seek refuge beneath the dome. There, they chose to start the Doomsday II craft. With the power of the dome, the goal was to build a spacecraft and escape further from our predators. Their work is what allows us to survive where nothing else can.

Doomsday II did not get off the ground because, over the next two generations, the outsiders took our children from us. By blood they were our kin, however, in mind they were alien and hostile to our ways. Slowly, they fled back to the places of the strangeStrange: we are all strange, so it is no surprise that strange happens.rs, there sharing their fates so none know that we live in the city of alpha. It is a ghost city powered entirely by light in a way that none of us understand. Few descendants of the Pax refugees remain in Alpha.

Alpha is now a monastery inhabited by 49 monks in seven groups. The monks collect boys who are outcasts in the world of the strangeStrange: we are all strange, so it is no surprise that strange happens.rs and bring them to Alpha for training. It is the early star age, 109 years after the breakthrough, and the monks know that the secret to understanding this technology will be spiritual. They repress their desire for revenge against the outsiders, however, they know that the Earth is doomed unless the formless disease is defeated.

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