Our part of the galaxy - like the other spiral arms - remains relatively
unexplored by most of the hyper-advanced races that dwell near the centre, or hub
cap, of the galaxy, and in the last few thousand years the only use
they have made of our sector (which consists of little more than two million
life-supporting planets) has been as a penal colony.
It was then purely by chance that Gaea, a woman from one of the old crime
families on the ultra-chic planet Chaos, and a neurotic with violent
tendencies, was dropped off in Northern Greece to serve a two thousand year
sentence for cannibalism. The gaolers, one of whom had managed to get her
pregnant in the long trip over, did not stay long enough to consider the fact
that dropping a violent psychotic on a planet whose native life forms had
vastly inferior powers was not really cricket.
The rest is history, or, at least, mythology, and is chronicled by Homer
and Euripides, amongst others. She bred incestuously with her son Uranus (no
jokes, please) to produce - no big surprise - a series of genetic freaks, some
of which were giants with a hundred hands and some of which had only one eye:
only the youngest seven were remotely normal. Of all the murderous family
squabbles that followed, culminating in her grandson Zeus emerging as the
ruler, you would not want to know - at least not until our book on the subject
comes out - but suffice it to say that if the Greeks thought they had problems
before the gods came on the scene, well, they hadn't seen nuthin' yet.
