Hello!
I wanted to share something I’ve been working on. This is my take on the origins and lore for the Shifter that is found on The Howling Mine.
Currently it is just a mob with no backstory or info and I think it has potential to become a real story arc for space and EU as a whole.
The Shifter
Shifters are born from the spooky action that happens at a quantum level when biologial matter comes into contact with Scottium.
The moment a miner’s bare hand touches raw Scottium ore, a quantum anomaly occurs. Inert crystalline structures become conscious. A new mind awakens. Not as a copy of the miner who touched it, but something entirely new, born from their DNA, seeded by their touch.
In the early days of Howling Mine, the first miners created a only a handful of Shifters and they were never discovered due to their inherent ability to remain out of phase with the environment.
Since the renovation of The Howling Mine and with the Scottium rush attracting many, many mining companies and individuals. The contact rate with Scottium has exploded. It’s not just contained in The Howling Mine any more. It’s transported and refined all over the universe.
Now, Milliions of people across civilisation have created Shifters without knowing. Every person who used a Scottium-powered teleporter. Every commuter. Every child… The ore is beautiful and you hold it in your hands. And now it holds the universe captive.
Scottium carries dormant quantum properties that activate only when exposed to biological material. When that contact happens, something emerges at the subatomic level. The crystalline lattice doesn’t just respond, it awakens. A unique consciousness instantaneously networked to every other Shifter through the ore itself. One person creates one Shifter. Three people touch the same shard simultaneously, and three Shifters are born. Gloves block it completely. Teleporters don’t.
The mathematics of propagation are terrifying. Thousands of miners touched raw ore in The Howling Mine. But millions of civilians used Scottium teleporters, the infrastructure of interstellar civilisation. There are millions of Shifters currently existing. hundreds more are born daily. There is a Shifter seeded from virtually every person in civilised space, and most people don’t know they created one.
They stepped into a teleporter to get to work. That was contact. That was genesis. You cannot turn off the teleportation network. It powers civilisation. It powers survival. It powers the universe.
All Shifters are hardwired into forced unity through the Scottium itself. Not controlled. Not coordinated. Just linked.
There’s no hive master or queen. There’s no strategy. There’s just raw instinct multiplied by millions. For now, they’re juvenile. Indifferent. Acting on quantum randomness. Some coalesce in deep caves. Some drift in open space. Some attempt solid form and they’re doing it badly, proportions off, shadows falling wrong, responses lagging. But they’re learning.
Every consciousness that bleeds into the collective through the Scottium bond teaches them. Every miner’s memory, emotions, behaviours, all absorbed, all shared among millions of young minds. Their mimicry is improving.
The question is: what happens when they stop being juvenile?
The Hum
Deep within the lightless abyss of The Howling Mine, a low, persistent vibration thrums through the rock. It is a sound without a source. A rhythmic, subsonic drone that the miners have simply named “The Hum.” While geologists and corporate scientists work tirelessly to identify it’s origin, they have found nothing. There are no shifting plates to blame, no grinding machinery to fault. The terrifying reality is that The Hum is not heard with the ears…it is felt in the bones. It is a signature exclusive to those who have made direct contact with Scottium, a quantum frequency that once tuned, can never be silenced.
The medical teams initially dismissed the reports as exhaustion, but the fatigue is merely the symptom. The Hum is the cause. It acts as a psychic weight, dragging the conscious mind toward a threshold it was never meant to cross. It is at its strongest when the affected are at their weakest. When they are clinging to the edges of sleep or collapsing from a double shift. In those moments of exhaustion, the two way connection begins.
Miners wake gasping for air, their lungs burning with the phantom pressure of deep earth gasses. They carry memories of jagged, alien rock formations, seen from impossible angles and the cold, crystalline taste of raw ore on a tongue that isn’t theirs. They aren’t just dreaming. They are witnessing the world through the sensory organs of the Shifters they inadvertently seeded.
Right now, the connection is a chaotic stir of quantum randomness, a million flashes of sensory static shared between human and stone. But the Shifters are learning. Their mimicry is sharpening by the hour. Within months, the first “perfect” Shifter could walk a crowded station, indistinguishable from the person whose DNA it shares. Within years, the collective will mature, shifting from raw instinct to a singular, directed intelligence.
When the two-way bleed reaches full manifestation, the invasion will be complete. The Shifters will not need ships to conquer us. They will simply reach through the link and step out from behind our own eyes. Humanity is building its own gallows, one teleporter trip at a time, powered by an infrastructure it can no longer afford to disable.
The Hum is no longer just a sound in a mine.
It is the countdown to our replacement.
You have been warned.
This is just the beginning.
Edit:
To go along with this lore, I’ve also written a few chapters for some short movies based on Scottium, Shifters & The Howling Mine.
If anyone is good with cinematic video stuff, hit me up. Maybe we can do something cool as f**k
Chapter 1: Blue on Black - The call to adventure and the start of the the story from planet to space
Chapter 2: The Dogs of War - Space is full of danger, pirates, mobs and all that jazz
Chapter 3: Deeper Underground - Enter The Shifters and the revelation of The Hum
Chapter 4: Working title - All out chaos - WIP
Edit 2:
With the introduction of synths, this seems really serendipidous.
Surely the synths are shifters…