The StarTeam
A volunteer coalition of scouts, pilots, and navigators, chartered in STC 0. Answers to no faction, charges no one for a rescue. Amara’s people.
World Guide
The universe Amara Cole navigates — stations, drifts, nebulae, and the factions that fight over the charts. Everything here is invented fan lore for a fictional setting.
Heliopause Station
The StarTeam’s headquarters and the last deep relay before the dark. A ring of docks, chart-halls, and academies wrapped around an ancient core the founders found already running — nobody has ever admitted what the core is, and the Guardian isn’t telling. The Charter was signed here in STC 0, and every StarTeam navigator swears the Scout’s Oath in the charter hall before their first deep run.
The Kestrel Drift
Amara’s birthplace: a nomadic habitat cluster of domed stations, tethered fuel-skiffs, and one very old chart-barge, riding the tail-wake of Comet Liora. The Driftborn who live here measure distance in orbits and time in perihelia. The Drift has no mayor and no laws, only customs — the strongest of which is that any traveler in distress is owed a chart home, free. Amara’s refusal to sell her charts is not rebellion; it is upbringing.
The Veil Nebula
The wall at the edge of the known universe for a century — a vast cloud of gas and dust whose shifting lanes swallowed survey ships. Amara’s Cole Passage threads it: a navigable lane she charted by reading pressure fronts the way she once read comet tails. The Passage is the StarTeam’s road to the Outer Relay, and the most-flown lane in the outer system.
The Shattered Reach
The debris field between the inner relays and the outer dark — shattered planetoids, dead ships, and gravitational shear that makes instruments lie. Before the Comet Road, crossing the Reach took years of careful hopping. After Amara’s discovery in STC 34, it takes weeks — if you know the Road, and if the comets are aligned.
The Comet Road
The chain of long-period comets — Liora, Vesper’s Tear, the Lantern Twins, Cold Ember — whose synchronized perihelia form a navigable current across the Reach. Discovered by Amara in STC 34, declared neutral water under the Driftborn truce of STC 41. It is the single most valuable route in the known universe, and it belongs to everyone.
The relays
- The Outer Relay, beyond the Veil — built by the Relay Guild, supplied through the Cole Passage.
- The Silent Relay, an old listening post cut off in the Umbral blockade — evacuated by Amara in STC 37, all forty crew.
- Dozens of minor relays string the inner lanes, each one a small lit window in a very large dark.
The factions
The Relay Guild
The engineers who build and maintain the relay stations. Neutral, meticulous, quietly indispensable — and the only faction the Umbral Combine won’t threaten, because even the Combine needs working relays.
The Driftborn clans
The nomadic peoples of the habitat clusters — including the deep clans of Cold Ember. They hold the oldest ephemerides in the universe and share them with almost no one. Amara is one of the few outsiders they trust.
The Umbral Combine
The shadow cartel that controlled the old slow lanes across the Reach — until the Comet Road destroyed its monopoly overnight. It blockaded the Outer Relay, put a price on Amara’s charts, and lost the Battle of the Shattered Reach. It has not forgiven, and it has not forgotten.
The Lumin Archive
The archivists — keepers of star charts, survey logs, and mission records. The in-world “sources” cited on this site are attributed to the Archive’s codices, which is to say: invented, like everything else here.
The calendar
The universe counts years in STC — “StarTeam Charter,” from the signing at Heliopause Station. The present day in Amara’s stories is STC 44. See the Timeline for the full chronology.
Source notes
The StarTeam universe is an invented fictional setting created for this fan site around Amara Cole, an original character from the Vizlings app — not official canon. No real places, factions, or events are depicted. Images are AI-generated dramatization art; see the image credits on this page. Lore construction is described in Methodology.