"Long ago, two races ruled over Earth: humans and monsters."
It's a familiar start of a story we all know and love, and also those of other stories based off of it. But in order to understand what makes this story different from the rest, you need to forget the idea that there was ever a conflict between humans and monsters. At least, not until farther down the road than you would expect.
Let's instead go to... say... July 6th, 1948. This is the date where Earth gets its first contact with an alien civilization in the last few thousand years. Of course, neither race was ready to learn of this discovery. Being as clever as the government forces around the world were, they were successful in cleverly leaking, downplaying, shuffling, and muddying the discovery. This went on for a little over a full century, until the people of Earth were ready to learn of the truth.
July 6th, 2050 - five hundred years before Under Station 13 was built (and don't worry, I'll get to that part soon) - the United Earth government finally provides its populace with proof of two things: first, there is such thing as extraterrestrial life in the universe. And second, given how little a human or monster mind can understand one so completely foreign to its way of thinking, this life is hostile. It was no longer a story about humans and monsters.
In this time period, Earth was also polluted and dying. Both races banded both their vast numbers and plentiful resources together in order to flee from the planet and into the cold void that is space. The larger dwarf planets are colonized, and from these, generational colony ships are launched into deep space. Research is also done into fringe physics, although most of the secrets of the Universe discovered were turned towards terraforming or defense from xenomorphs. Compared to most sentient races, humans and monsters bred like rats and the plague of new life they brought with them seems to blight out anywhere they went.
In this new and seemingly infinite sea, religion does all but disappear, and the vast distances both races spread out to results in both seeing a return to defacto autonomous feudalism. For the next two hundred years, the forces of Earth spread across the cosmos like a wildfire, stretching farther down the Milky Way's spiraling arms with each generation of Sol races and technology.
And now was the part where both humans and monsters would see conflict. A few generations of each race warred between each other and even amongst themselves, purely for dominance while simultaneously battling other alien species for the sake of survival. Hell, most of these xenos that were encountered during this time period were wiped out entirely, planet cracking and, ironically, genocide becoming a staple of warfare for both races. There was no longer a sense of nostalgia between the two races for their original planet and the sun it spiraled around, nor of humans and monsters being peacefully united together. And when there was very little external threat? Both races turned against each other in wrath.
Nobody knows or remembers why this all happened, but it wasn't the threat of xenomorphs that shook down humanity. It was instead something that existed since time immemorial: war. The vast wormhole highways that kept both races in contact with each other were bombed on both ends. Humans and monsters were lost in the void and ravaged by hellfire, being slaughtered from all sides, from all fronts, from all faces. For many decades, technology and history are lost and bastardized in a vast anarchy. Different secs of the two races, separated by unfathomable gulfs of empty space, take different approaches to restoring order. In this time, several xenos species who were assumed extinct encroached on space previously held by humanity, even the systems closest to Sol.
And in the fringes of inhabited spaces, it's no longer traditional government but instead megacorporations that rule. They are interplanetary nations onto themselves, ones without borders and without scruples. For two hundred years they have fought for space dollars and intellectual properties, content to let the old portals to humanity far gone lay derelict in the vacuum.
The year is 2550. Nanotrasen Systems, or simply Nanotrasen for short, has become the largest manufacturer and employer in known space, but not by much. Their business practices and fabulous wealth have garnered both power and ire from interest groups and other corporations. This very company is, by majority, run and employed by monsters. Nine years earlier, company stocks began to fall in price and Nanotrasen began to fear their days of dominance nearing its end.
And it would've been the company's end as well, if it were not for a discovery made in 2543 by a joint Nanotrasen-UEG mining company: Silar Group. Silar Group made a fascinating discovery in a sunless system - massive gas giants of a strange purple vapor with untold properties. This vapor turned out to be a powerful energy source, which revitalized Nanotrasen's success through secret projects surrounding the substance. The substance was dubbed "Plasma," given its ability to easily gain incredible heat and combust. This material is only found in large amounts in asteroids in this region of space and around star system that were either dead or missing. Nanotrasen became the largest seller and researcher of the material and still holds this position in the current year of 2550.
But not all successes are without rivalries. Enter: The Syndicate. It's a vast criminal enterprise of revolutionaries, pirates, and corporate-sponsored no-goods run primarily by humans. The Syndicate is a force much feared in the region and has proved time and again too wily and resilient to be taken down. They seem unusually focused on Nanotrasen and their plasma production at a level which no one in living memory can recall seeing before. Their reasons for targeting the big NT are shrouded in both mystery and enigma, but money and spite didn't have to be ruled out as a guess. Worse still, the technology of The Syndicate are far newer and rarer than even that of Nanotrasen, who have lost many an enterprise to Syndicate machinations.
Still with me? Great! Now I can start getting to the fanfiction part!
What perspective do you prefer when you read these things? First person? Second? Third?
Eh, I'll figure something out by the time you click onto the first chapter.