Synopsis "Prodigium: Ascension"
Faith. Fate. Two words so full of potency, fraught with nuances that touch on many of humanity's hopes and fears. Yet these words are commonly employed as if they are mutually exclusive-that the realities they represent exist within continuums in opposition to each other.Forty-five hundred years ago humanity sprang outwards from the surface of Earth to reach for the stars, for new worlds to mould and then inhabit. A new beginning was enabled, one that put behind the fears that humankind would forever be doomed to reside on a world that was rapidly overheating, running out of resources and, it seemed with every passing year, becoming less conducive to life.More than four millennia ago, through the efforts of one unique woman, humanity was freed from its home world to spread out across the Milky Way, its future fundamentally set on a new course: a future full of previously unimagined and burgeoning possibilities. Hope was renewed. A fresh vigour took hold and humanity surged out to grasp a broader destiny: to become more than what they were. Or so all believed. Yet, despite the incredible impact this woman had...yet...Yet, it seems that we cannot escape what we are. That the great leap forward was no leap at all. Though the forces of gravity no longer hold us back, our natures bind us to a fate that far too often promulgates only greed, envy, selfishness, ruthlessness, fear, cruelty and hate, and the primal urge to slake the need for revenge. Has human society changed not at all? Do we remain substantially no different than our ancestors? We are free in ways they never were. Or are we? Has our greater liberty only been a chimera? Does our civilization continue to form unconsciously along lines of inequality and work to enforce that singular condition, ensuring that the spirit and hopes of humanity will forever be chained?Some among us were unwilling to accept that premise, that irreducible destiny. They sought for more, wished for it with all of their hearts and being. The question essentially became: what would it take to bring out the best in each human being? A wider, a more encompassing vision? A mass movement? How would it be led? By whom? The answer was surprising. And it came, remarkably in a similar fashion to how humanity first reached for other stars. By two exceptional teenagers.Both born on the world of Galileo, this boy and this girl could not have been more removed from each other: one born to privilege and wealth, the other to squalor and quasi-slavery. Yet each of their respective states arose from the same source, and it primarily, among other forces, both propelled them to what they ultimately achieved and yet worked to oppose them.For an evil has existed on Galileo for millennia, festering, unsated, hidden, unknown by the bulk of its population. In the midst of malignant intent, deception and betrayal, both faith and fate worked to bring these two together. It could not have happened in any other way for these two prodigies, apart, adrift and alone, until they found each other again after the most inauspicious of beginnings.They ascended and brought us with them.
