编辑“Galactic Cold War/The Xuman Overmind”（章节）

== Background ==
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| description= '''A Far Safer Place'''. Who better to be your Galactic Custodian than ''Stefan Anon'' and ''Door Monster'' - who totally knows what they're doing, by the way. Custodian capabilities are extensive, powerful, and temporary (usually). 
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While the Empire spanned from one corner of the galaxy to the other, there were yet pockets that were poorly explored, and in one of these, a race of powerful psionics existed and thrived, though in a way that would seem utterly alien to any other. Had this race the desire, they could have overturned the galactic order and conquered it in a matter of decades, but material pleasures disinterested them. Rather, they made their home in the Shroud, a realm so hostile that simply entering it challenged the greatest of the Empire’s specialists.

But this blindness to the material proved their undoing. When the Empire’s psionics learned of this race’s existence and recognized their vast power and potential, they petitioned the Emperor to allow for experimentation; if successful, the psionics theorized that the power generated would be safer, more available, and many times more abundant than even that of a Dyson sphere. The Emperor gave his consent.

The Holy Psionic Order worked tirelessly until, eventually, they discovered that this race would commune at one particular location in the Shroud on a regular basis, as much as a location or regularity can exist there, and it was at this nexus point that they would transmute these creatures into a near-infinite power supply utilizing an explosive psionic device.

However, when this device was detonated, the consequences would shatter the empire, as well. This nexus point in the Shroud was not arbitrary; it served as the locus that tied together every hyperlane linking the stars together, and when this point was struck, the hyperlanes came unspooled and went slack, stranding every colony from one another. But this hidden race of psionics suffered a worse fate: in this explosion, their consciousnesses were fused into a great Hive Mind, stuck static in the Shroud, and each individual consciousness tied irrevocably to its body in ways that they had never experienced.

In this state, this fledgling Hive Mind nursed themselves back from the trauma of this abuse and desperately sought to balance the millions of voices inside of them. However, Hive Minds may not roam the shroud freely even as they use it to coordinate their vast consciousnesses, and so this great and powerful child was barred from its home by virtue of its very being.

Desperate, they spent the intervening hundreds of years dedicated to scientific advancement, searching for some way to once again enter and roam their home, and now, as the hyperlanes grow taut once again, they tentatively seek out others that might help them in their bid to fight their fate.