Wilbak Nebula
From FABT
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Nineteen Pillars of Ascension / Milky Way Galaxy |
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Xhosa Relay |
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The Wilbak Nebula is a cluster located within the Attican Traverse, sandwiched between the Shadow Sea and Maroon Sea clusters. Consisting of five systems, the Wilbak Nebula has been left almost entirely untouched throughout the millennia, only colonized intermittently by the odd species prior to being harvested by the Reapers during one of their many hundreds of thousands of cycles, and as such its resources were largely untapped. It wouldn't be until the asari cycle when a rapidly expanding Tuchankan Empire stumbled upon the nebula in 175 CE, quickly claiming it and the vast resources within it. The krogan proceeded to colonize at least a dozen worlds within the nebula, setting up mining facilities across the most resource-rich worlds and either selling them in trade to other nations or handing it over to the krogan military and civilian sectors for use across the Empire; by the time the Krogan Rebellions broke out, the nebula was inhabited by 42 million krogan, and many of its mining operations would be claimed directly by the Imperial military for use in fueling the war effort, with the krogan war machine stripping entire worlds bare of resources across the sixty years of the conflict. After the war and following the signing of the Treaty of Taetrus by the defeated krogan, they were forced to abandon the entire Wilbak Nebula, and their colonies and mines were abandoned. With the nebula effectively stripped by the krogan war machine, the Citadel Council saw no reason to colonize the nebula themselves, and it was entirely left uninhabited, especially after the establishment of the Attican Traverse in 812 CE.
Centuries after the Rebellions ended, Wilbak was totally abandoned. The krogan colonies and mining facilities left behind were left untouched and quickly reclaimed by nature, and since then the nebula was only ever used by pirates and mercenaries to set up bases for raids and attacks, and one world, Hake, would be used by Terminus forces as a staging base during the Council-Terminus War, where afterwards it was abandoned again. The Migrant Fleet would occasionally use the Wilbak Nebula for refuge whilst in the Attican Traverse as a result of the lack of through-traffic, allowing them privacy and safe harbor far from prying eyes. During the Reaper War, the UGC would reactivate many of the abandoned colonies and turn them into makeshift bases for storing evacuated civilians, relying on its absence from most star charts to hide them from the Reapers. The Nebula would fall under the control of the Galactic Dominion in 2200 CE, the Xhosa system in the Wilbak Nebula would be used in a joint venture between the Systems Coalition and Republic of Rannoch to build a top secret shipyard for producing new, state-of-the-art vessels free from the watchful eye of the Special Tasks Group and other Council intelligence agencies: at the same time, the Bapedi system was used by Prometheus for setting up listening posts. Following the Dominion Civil War, the Dominion shipyards and listening posts would be dismantled, with the Second Rachni Collective claiming the nebula and establishing numerous colonies across the cluster.