Little is known for certain about the race that thrived millennia ago throughout the known galaxy. Their ruins, strikingly similar to one another, suggest an orderly life, efficient in use of resources. This would be consistent with old legends of vastly powerful generators hidden within the ruins, but even among our ancestors these stories were believed only by a handful of romantics.

The only authentic Intoan relics are ceramic pots of unusual shape, engraved with domestic scenes usually interpreted as depicting related events in sequential fashion, although even this much is uncertain since the actors have varying numbers of appendages from one frame to the next. Even more perplexing, the number and size of appendages is on average larger in older artifacts, varying from hundreds in the oldest specimens to two or three, or sometimes none at all, in artifacts just prior to the Intoa’s presumed extinction some ten thousand years ago.

A large body of Intoan science and mythology has come down to us as the Starlight Documents, compiled long ago by Almnetian monastics but only deciphered a thousand years after Almnetic Decay. Controversy still rages over which passages are religious parables and which astrophysics equations.

—Thucydides Plutonium