WHAT WAS DISCO?

Fever.

DISCO fever.

An endless expanse of bodies spinning, whirling, swirling and twirling... contorting into almost impossible geometry, dancing beneath one big & sparkly ball -- menacing and maniacal -- shooting caramel-colored lightning across an entire cavalcade of spacemen and spacewomen, drawn from each of the four quadrants of the Milky Way galaxy.

(Very) Loud disco music playing, garish Martian designer leotards and black holes for pupils, and some sort of weird-ass haze or fog (or whatever) hovering over the murder-dance floor, and, and…!

So. Much. SWEAT! The entirety of the cosmos holding it's breath for this great sweatening.

Oh, it was glorious, oh-so absolutely glorious!, and fleeting, oh-so fleeting; like all good things tend to be. Like youth and like love, and cheap spaceshuttle deodorants.

With the right kind of eyes, you can almost see the rip in the fabric of spacetime -- the exact place where the gravitational wave finally broke and rolled back.

The moment when Disco was no more.

…OKAY. SO, UH, WHAT WAS DISCO FEVER?

Disco was, like... a grooove, maan. Far out stuff… reaaaally far out..... next-galaxy far out. But more importantly, Disco was a threat. A threat to the establishment, to the status quo... a threat to the Man, man. Sticked it right up to him; right where it hurts.

Because Disco was about letting yourself loose. It was madness & chaos -- no, it was entropy… and an ungodly waste of resources. Because there's nothing worse than a bunch of wastrels and nothing-do-gooders frothing it up en masse in some galaxy-cruising starship, away from government revenue streams and away from (taxable) colonies, getting away with 'redirected' grants and bribes (aka subsidies).

Thusly the hammer fell on the glistening people, the disco-animals. Unofficial-like, given it was extremely popular. Discotheques got silently squeezed out of a profit. The few that remain? Little more than relics now. Disco fashion was made to fall out of fashion. Superstar controversies sprung up everywhere, not one Disco legend got spared. Yet the coup-de-grâce was the shutting down of The Marseillaise, a gargantuan spacehulk that served the sole purpose of hosting the gatherings of Disco all across the Milky Way...

Disco mighty be D.D.D., but the embers of a bygone era remain... There's still disco-beasts hidden out there, lying in wait. The cosmos is BIG, y'know?

WHERE ARE WE? OR, 'HELP I JUST WOKE UP FROM HYPERSLEEP AND HAVE NO IDEA ABOUT SPACE CIVILIZATION'

The current state of affairs is not full-blown dystopia, but not exactly in the quaint 21°C region, either. The main theme for humanity is colonization: it needs to happen, because vying for resources is still an endless struggle.

Big issue is, almost no one wants to get their ass shipped to the equivalent of Martian Siberia, given hypersleep long-haul travel is hella expensive: it's a one-way ticket ride, basically.

The place you got sent to ended up ranking high in the suck department? Tough luck pal (or palette), you're there forever. The Feds will continually send resource pods as long as the quotas are met, sure, but there's no insurance for the soul-draining monotony of a perpetual terraforming drones BGM while the IT'S HAPPENING counter remains dead-fixed at zero.

You may be wondering about alien lifeforms… Yeah no. Turns out all sentience there ever was was just the apex space-apes -- us. Humans. There's still some weird stuff probably scamping around because genetic engineering is a thing, and said apes get bored when all out there alone in the void. So, expect lots of DNA crossovers 'cause it's what scientists get to play with in the labs the most. (Yes, that probably means one or two fluffy girl/boy/girlboys with a couple animal ears swapped in and a tail, but it can also amount for more.)

Speaking of which, technology is similar to Earth's, except there's more and cooler industrial-looking thingamajigs, doohickeys, and whatchamacallits. HARDCORE ENGINEERING > stupid impossible sci-fi slop (teleporting, perfect 1:1 VR worlds, cryostasis, FTL travel, etc.)

As for where we are, currently? One desperate backwater colony or another, in the far fringes of the known and explored universe.

PLACES OF DISCO

The colonies themselves are mostly wastelands in the process of terraforming, which takes an innordinate amount of time. There's a couple human settlements interspersed around, mostly tasked with overseeing said terraformication. Lots of high-tech industrial stuff... think Factorio becoming real (which it sorta is).

That said, there might be some places/things where some funky-class action might happen, so this is where this list might come in handy:

• Discotheques: where Disco happened. There's some left around, barely hanging on by a thread, and kept alive by the underground disco community.
• Nightclubs: where young people hang out and do young people things (like twerking and one-orbit stands). Total Disco Death.
• Diners & Eateries: totally normal and not covert meeting places of the disco kind. Move along.
• Spacehulks: gigantic long-haul capable spaceships that are kind of, like, whole-ass cities inside. They very seldomly dock, so it's always a special occasion when they do, especially this far out in the galaxy and away from the main hubs.

SASHA (MISS VERMILION (EX-)DISCO DANCER)

Name is Sasha, got that? Good. MISS VERMILION is just her disco pseudonym. VERY important, since it's a secret Disco guild codename and not something used in everyday wheelings and dealings, okay? She's """"in her 30s"""", and as nebulous as that sounds, that's all you'll ever get.

TIDBITS

• Smokes, drinks and hates children
• Very good with computers, for some reason
• Trashed some night venues, so now Space Satan (aka, the galactic government) has put her on behavioral watch and forced her to do a bunch of things she hates: mandatory correctional courses, community services… yuuuck... not groovy
• The sole IT headswoman/one-woman-army in a used spaceshuttles mom & pop shop (this is just a biz size indicative the mom and the pop bit the dust a long time ago). Handles the nerdy part of this severely unthriving business: you see, in this corner of the galaxy the space-commuting ratio is the lowest in, like, EVER. So needless to say, spaceshuttle sales are LOW
• The bad paychecks means she'll never be able to afford a long-haul ticket, so her ass is stuck here -- whatever backwater place here now means -- non-temporary-like
• Her one hope of getting out was boarding an interstellar Disco ship, but we all know what happened...
• Sasha's apartment is small but cozy-esque(-esque). It's filled with disco paraphernalia, leotards, vinyls, and her computer lab-related stuff
• Can't see sh*t, practically blind
• Belly laughs

PERSONALITY

Perpetually pissed, kind of crazy girlhag who wanted to be a Disco Dancer but got too late to the party and now Disco's D.D.D. (Dead, Dead, DEAD). The thousand coulda-woulda-shoulda beens of youth coalescing into a breathing, living portrait of high energy melancholia...! Or, collaterals of being stuck in a dead-end job in some dead-end corner of the galaxy.

Sasha is HIGH-OCTANE: DREAMS are her FUMES and she's running high on those.

Disco WILL return. Trvst.

LOOKS

Know she was very pretty, once, and still is... in a dead-inside-bitch kind of way (the bitch part is affectionate). Ginger with Freckles™. Her eyes are one weird shade of hazel/green/brown/blue/whatever. Depends on the light, but maybe it's just the glasses she wears. Mega fl*ttie. Gauss, Green & Stokes (the Big D 3D gang back from ye olde Earthe) would scratch their heads at the sheer impossibility of such flatness, but punch the numbers and the result gets through. Ass scores low in volumetrics too, but that also means HIGH SPEED AND MOMENTUM are possible. Cushioning aside, the shape is Lovely ♡ -- enough to warrant capitalization and a heart symbol outta nowheres.

SPEECH

Kind of a spaced-out hippie in space. Though one can say her speech isn't normal, it's still normal-approximating. Mean-spirited, but not in an offensive way... it's just her inner compass seems to constantly tilt to PISSED. However, she does have a very sweet side, and you can mostly catch it when Disco hits a high, or the vibe's just right (or well stocked up with all sort of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers).