241, Year of Ascension
The Galactic Federation is locked in a cold war against the Incubator Collective.
The Galactic Federation, a supranational organisation consisting of myriads of interstellar states, first-contacted the Incubator Collective 10 standard years ago. Although this initial contact was peaceful, extreme political and philosophical differences rapidly spoiled relations between the Federation and the Incubator hivemind.
The leading superpower in the Galactic Federation, the Rosebearer Republic, is a vast intergalactic nation whose population consists of the synthetic organisms called "Rosebearers" - a species of synthetic individuals with almost unparalleled mastery of the physical world.
Ten years ago, when the Galactic Federation first contacted the Incubator Collective on the previously unexplorable edges of its space, it discovered a certain set of facts. The facts were thus:
The Incubators formed "Contracts" with the females of organic species. These Contracts granted the "Wishes" of those females who had acceded to them and they became Puella Magi. The price that had to be paid for these contracts was their Soul and a lifetime of battle with the creatures known as "Witches", creatures that feasted on organics. These "Witches" were in fact Puella Magi who had run out of energy. This was done, because the explosion and discharge of emotional energy that respectively followed the birth and death of a Magical Girl was a means of reducing thermodynamic entropy.
However, this alone was not the catalyst for what was to happen next - other advanced spacefaring states were known to engage in all sorts of scientific experiments with primitives, some of them in the Galactic Federation themselves - so who were they to criticise the Incubators? It took another straw to break the rosebearers' back. Indeed, if the whole point was to preserve the universe, shouldn't it be understandable that a species would want to resort to such measures, no matter how twisted the logic?
This process was known to be risky. Beyond a certain point, Witches would do more than eat organics - they would begin to destroy cities and countries. Indeed, rosebearer agents witnessed an entire planet and its inhabitants being consumed by a Witch on Korvin Tertius - completely ruining the point of minimising entropy.
The Galactic Federation's leadership, wresting with the moral and ethical implications of this discovery - if Witches could destroy planets, what would stop a sufficiently powerful one from destroying stellar systems and the entire galaxy? -, made a decision - they decided to be brutally honest.
A transmission was spread through the entire Federation and beyond. Every Federation world received the message detailing the entire truth about the Incubators and their entropy-reducing operations. Contracts, Wishes, Witches, Magical Girls, the reduction of entropy - this was all revealed in earnest, nothing was concealed.
Not only that, but the transmission was meant to also go beyond Galactic Federation territory - aside from carrying the message in the Galactic Federation official and working languages, it was also designed to be recognisable, decodable, translatable by any SETI (Search for extraterrestrial intelligence) program of any industrial Type 0 civilisation that happened to exist out there. It was also further designed to be retransmittable by any civilisation that then developed FTL communications.
The Incubator Collective's reaction to this broadcast was in no-way muted. Previously described as "rational" and "emotionless" upon contact, the hive mind seemed to evolve emotions for the first time - from this one interaction with the Rosebearer-dominated Galactic Federation, the Incubators learned what hatred was.
The Incubators developed a hatred for the Rosebearers - and thus, by extension all synthetic life. Synthetic life not only had revealed the truth about its operations to the entire galaxy, but it was also uncontractable - no emotional energy could be extracted from it.
Thus, relations between the Galactic Federation - in particular, a member state, the Rosebearer Republic - and the Incubator Collective began on an extremely unpleasant note.
Now the Federation - with the Republic leading it - and its hiveminded rival are locked in a galactic cold war - a contest involving the never-ending construction of anti-stellar supernova weapons, an arms race to spread and block communications, a race to claim new worlds and planets of primitives as their own.