MOSAIC is  a phenomenon in and around Alliance space: a new biological mystery with unpredictable, often terrifying, effects.

The existence of MOSAIC is highly classified information within the Alliance. Even more classified is this: the Alliance has few facts and too many questions about what MOSAIC is, let alone what it’s capable of. MOSAIC forms have only been identified within the past decade – plant-like growths, interlaced structures, and swarms of unknown and assimilated lifeforms that emerge at seemingly random times and places. Wherever MOSAIC manifests, the world changes: climates shift, systems fail, and people disappear – or are altered, nightmarishly, in mind and body alike.

Countering such a profound threat is among the Alliance’s highest priorities.

Is MOSAIC one mind or many? Would we recognise it as a mind? What does it want? Does it have capacity for hatred, or is it driven by pure instinct: which would be worse? Is it one phenomenon, or multiple interlinked phenomena? Are we seeing the full extent of what it is, or is there more to come? Can it understand us – and would we want it to?

These are just a few questions pondered by the brightest minds of the Alliance. Although the phenomenon is currently concealed from the public, the crew of the Ardent have been briefed to be extremely vigilant for MOSAIC activity on their travels. Remember that anything you can learn, no matter how seemingly inconsequential, might be vital to the Alliance’s future.

Diplomacy will see you trying to understand a mind (or no mind, or many) from first principles, breaking ground with a true first contact whilst working with others to contain threats. Combat will see you tailoring your strategies on the fly in response to all manner of biological threats, which adapt as quickly as you can adapt to them. Bio-med will break new frontiers for science as you deal with something truly alien, and manage its effects on your crewmates. Engineering will cross the line between biological and mechanical as they get to grips with assimilated components – and protect their tools from the gooey and the gruesome.

No discovery is made without fear, but MOSAIC is something else entirely. What are you prepared to sacrifice for knowledge?