Notes of Human Interstellar Society #2: Hidden Initiatives They are the sons and daughters of the Great Celestial Lion, Leonus Rex. Their central world of governance is named in reference to the formidable beast slain by Ancestral Earth's mythic Herakles. Though near in terms of interstellar distance and jump-energy requirements, Nemaea --and all of the inhabited worlds of the Mu Leonus System--are the most psychologically-distant of all Human communities. Of intimate Nemaean habits, we assume more than we know. Their unusual, interstellar vessels pursue arcane and ambiguous missions. Methane-dominant gas giants center their compulsive attention. A string of gravity manipulation plants have herded nearly a dozen supernova remnants into a concentrated, nutronium-centered mass a bare 100 light years from their home star system. This spectacular mass (visible from every Human populated world) is regularly harvested by factory ships and energy manipulation platforms. The end results of such cunning industry are, however, invisible to the Pan-Human community at large. Conspiracy Rumors abound--the most common of which centers on the not-unlikely possibility that the Mu Leonus inhabitants are in sustained and intimate contact with an interstellar intelligence of non-Human origin. If this rumor is ever substantiated, it would mean that the most secretive and eccentric of Human communities is at the forefront of interspecies contact, and perhaps the present state of Nemaen society represents the future of Humanity as a whole. ***** This is a work in progress... The "Nemaean" ships are from a photograph I took of a piece of equipment left over from a steel mill in Dortmund, Germany. The nebula/supernova remnant is actually cigarette smoke (seriously tweaked.) I created the starfield and planet in photoshop. As always, thank you all for viewing and commenting, and if anyone has any ideas of what I could do with that miserably empty lower right quadrant of the image, let me know.