A long time ago…
Somehow, Palpatine returned.
And then a bunch of crazy stuff happened. No one is exactly sure what...or why, but it did. And while all the details might be really significant to a small group of people, the only thing that mattered to the galaxy at large were the following:
The First Order was completely destroyed.
The New Republic was still woefully short on a military, which in turn meant it was woefully incapable of maintaining peace and order.
Hosnian Prime was still blown up.
And while the New Republic did its best to govern from the various core worlds and spaceships, the Senate knew that it had to decide on a new capital world. And of course every Senator thought their homeworld was the perfect location.
And then there were those who thought it should just go back to Coruscant. The buildings were already built. People were used to it.
But that talked ended when Dr. Quinn Sordessa and her team sent out a frantic report to the Senate that Coruscant was breaking. Thousands of years of constantly digging down and building up had taken its toll.
The planet was breaking apart.
"How soon?"
"Why?"
"Can it be reversed?"
"Another study needs to be commissioned."
The Senate bickered. The only thing they could agree upon was to place the planet under mandatory evacuation.
In reality, it was a voluntary evacuation. After all, how do you force trillions of beings off-world?
And if you could, where would you put them?
--
This is where we are today:
The Republic has set up a rudimentary blockade of Coruscant, but it is too thin and wide to be truly effective. Those who really want to get on world, can.
The upper class have evacuated - if they believe Dr. Sordessa. There are plenty who do not.
The poor who believe wait for their turn, assigned a lottery number that is called whenever a Republic refugee ship comes into port. Those who do not believe that Coruscant is going to break do their best to live as they always did.
The Republic pays any ship captain willing to ferry refugees off-world. It's not great pay, but it's honest work.
The Crime Lords and Gangsters and Syndicates are all swooping in to take advantage of the chaos in any way they can, whether it's plundering the abandoned levels or swindling the desperate.
The corporations are no better, trying to squeeze every last credit out of the citizens.
Historians from all across the Galaxy rush in, taking everything of cultural significance, archiving all they can.
Some look for Palpatine's rumored archives - vast stores of Sith knowledge hidden away. Others want the wisdom from the Jedi Archives.
Some look for the records of the Imperial Security Bureau, or the Imperial Science Division, wondering what dark information can be made useful.
Trillions of lives means trillions of stories playing out all at once.
You get to help tell them.
The stories created from this will serve as the living background of Silhouette Zero Season 5.