OtherSpace Observer

✨ The OtherSpace Observer - Issue 2 - June 2025

June 28 marks not just the anniversary of our beginning, but a new chapter in the long, twisting saga of our shared imagination. Iron’s End is your new home base. The edges are jagged. The lights flicker. The stories? They're yours to write, again.

Wes Platt

— 7 min read
✨ The OtherSpace Observer - Issue 2 - June 2025

📜 Editor’s Note from Brody

Twenty-seven years. That’s how long this strange, stubborn, beautiful universe has been kicking around the stars.

When I first launched OtherSpace back in 1998, I wasn't sure it’d still have a pulse in 2025. Let alone one strong enough to come roaring back to life.

But here we are - older, maybe weirder, definitely wiser - and we’re lighting the engines again.

June 28 marks not just the anniversary of our beginning, but a new chapter in the long, twisting saga of our shared imagination. Iron’s End is your new home base. The edges are jagged. The lights flicker. The stories? They're yours to write, again.

This soft-launch month has already been a thrill - seeing players old and new spark stories, resurrect long-dormant characters, and build fresh lore from the bones of the old worlds. But on June 28, we officially reopen the grid. That means faction plots kick into gear, storylines get teeth, and the setting starts pushing back.

If you're just joining us: Welcome aboard. If you've been riding since the old days: You already know the drill. Either way, you’re part of what makes this place worth returning to.

OtherSpace has always been more than a MUSH. It’s a living, breathing experiment in collaborative storytelling. It’s weird. It’s wild. Sometimes it breaks your heart. I suppose that’s how you know it’s working.

Here’s to the next cycle. Let’s see what the void throws at us.

- Wes Platt, a.k.a. Brody

Sponsor OtherSpace MUSH!

🧠 State of the Grid

Iron’s End


🧱 The station still stands - but gravity feels thinner these days. Like something’s pulling.

  • The vents on Deck E are breathing cold mist, even though the life support systems register normal. A child says she saw someone crawl out of one, hairless and wrong-shaped. Security laughed. She hasn’t spoken since.
  • A merchant brought a shipment of frozen protein bricks from a supposedly derelict freighter. Within hours, people started dreaming about drowned cities. One of the dockhands gouged out their own eyes “to stop seeing it walk.”
  • The gravity glitch on the promenade lasted six minutes, during which nobody could hear sound - except one old woman, who just smiled and said: “It’s tuning us.”

🔧 Ashen Pact

Scavengers. Survivors. Something stirring.

  • Bay 6 remains closed after the “vent burst.” But rumor says it wasn’t a pressure failure - it was breathing. And it wasn’t air.
  • Someone sent an old Consortium distress signal through the Pact’s shortwave net. It’s not just ancient; it’s looping. And the voice is someone long dead.
  • A missing Pact shuttle was found adrift with its hull etched in looping spirals. No crew aboard, but the nav system is locked onto a set of coordinates outside the known star charts - coordinates written in Pact-born graffiti.
  • One of the salvager crews tried to open the cryo-pod from last cycle. The bay lights went out, and when they came back up, the pod was gone. So were two of the crew.

🚷 Rustborn

Metal dreams. Burned gods. New clans rising.

  • The Coil Hounds went silent mid-transmission. Their last message: a schematic that looks like a machine - and a grave.
  • A splinter group calling themselves Ashmouth has started implanting themselves with something they call “ghost steel.” They say it sings. They say it hurts. They say it’s worth it.
  • One of the Oathcutters hijacked a Pact courier ship and transmitted a riddle before vanishing: “What burns but isn't fire, devours but isn't hunger?” The answer might be waiting inside the locked crate labeled “FOR THE NEXT STORM.” Still unopened. Still humming.
  • A clanless Rustborn woman walked into Iron’s End airlock naked but for a rusted crown of bolts. She said she’s “the last dream of the first machine.” She hasn't blinked in three days.

🕯 Hollow Choir

Not dead. Not alive. Now listening.

  • A voice has started bleeding through the long-range arrays - a whisper looped backward, distorted like it’s underwater. Choir linguists say it’s a memory being broadcast. A shared one.
  • A Choir reliquary was found in the maintenance crawlways. It contains a mask with six eyeholes and a choirmark for Rebirth. But the Choir says it never left their care.
  • A Choir “exile” has been building a garden in the lowest decks, using bones and nutrient paste. They say it’s “for what comes after.” The roots are starting to push through the floor.
  • Someone found the crystal from last cycle in the vents. It’s grown.

🛰 Spotlight Feature

This Issue: 🪐 5 Things We Think We Know About Mars in 2825

Originally published in our r/otherspacemush subreddit!

Under Hollow Choir Control

Since the Hollow Choir seized control of Mars and turned the red planet into a cathedral of contagion, strange rumors and half-truths have seeped from behind the dome. Whether whispered in spacer bars, passed along by desperate pilgrims, or salvaged from Choir-broadcast echoes, here are five things people think they know about life under their sacred rot.

1. “Every year, they build a ship. Every year, it dies.”

Once a Martian year, the Hollow Choir completes the same sacred ritual: the launch of a biomechanical vessel called a Viral Saint - a fusion of martyr, machine, and blight - destined for Earth. Each ship is grown in the catacombs beneath the Dormant Gate, sanctified with Choir hymns and seeded with hopeful pathogens. These are not weapons. They are pilgrims, designed to pierce the quarantine and draw near to the source: Earth, birthplace of the pure Helix strain, the Choir’s holiest mystery.

And every year, Earth’s ancient automated defenses wake from dormancy and destroy it in orbit, without fail.

Still, the Choir rejoices. They believe Earth is not rejecting them - it is testing their resolve. Each failed ship is a question offered. Each martyr lost is an answer earned. Earth is sacred and sleeping - but when the right vessel arrives, the Choir believes it will open its wounds and whisper the cure.

And so as the next Viral Saint gestates in its chrysalis of bone and fluid, the question spreads like spores across the stars:
What if this is the year it gets through?

2. “Nobody walks out of the Sanctum Vox the same - if they walk out at all.”

At the heart of the Vox Spire lies the Sanctum Vox, a pulsing cathedral of rusted steel and sentient decay. It's said to be alive with disease-born divinity, its walls grown from Choir flesh and its sermons broadcast through infected neural clusters. Pilgrims enter to seek truth. Some never come back. Others emerge weeping, euphoric, no longer entirely human. Or entirely alone.

3. “They believe rot is beautiful, but only when it’s earned.”

To the Choir, random suffering is meaningless. But sacred infection - chosen infection - is divine. Only those who endure the right trials, accept the right spores, and prove themselves worthy are allowed to carry the true strains. To be denied contagion is to be judged impure. To be accepted is to walk the long, fevered path toward transcendence.

4. “The plague they worship isn’t from this universe.”

Some believe the Helix virus isn’t a mutation, it’s a message. A parasitic intelligence from outside known space, communicated through entropy and rot. The Choir’s rituals might not just be prayers - they could be signals, calling to something old and hungry. If that’s true, they aren’t worshipping a god. They’re feeding it.

5. “Visitors are welcome. Guests are infected. Converts are rewritten.”

Outsiders can visit Mars. Technically. The Vox Spire even has a diplomatic landing zone. But everyone who leaves carries something with them - sometimes a new belief, sometimes a persistent rash, sometimes just dreams they can’t quite shake. The Choir’s true genius may be in its bioengineering: viruses that rewrite behavior, install faith, or erase resistance. You’ll never know what you brought back until it’s far too late.

Got your own stories or wild theories about Mars in 2825? Drop them below. Just remember - if you can still breathe easy, you're probably not listening close enough.

🎤 From the Community

  • Congratulations to Maina, our May 2025 Roleplayer of the Month!
  • Welcome to our newest characters, Vox and Sefra!
  • Thanks to Maina and Rosalyn for entering our Helix fiction contest! We'll announce the winner in the July edition of The OtherSpace Observer.

🧰 Behind the Scenes

Want to run a player scene or arc? Ping Brody on Discord!

🫶 Thanks to Our Supporters


Huge thanks to our Patreon crew:

Curnan, Seth, Navigator, Kaiser, Colchek, and Jeremy - you’re keeping the station spinning and the story alive.

Every dollar supports:

  • Hosting at otherspacemush.com
  • The 24/7 MUSH server
  • Premium subreddit features
  • Community outreach like Facebook ads and new player onboarding
Check Out Patreon!

📡 Closing Signal

Thanks for reading this issue of the OtherSpace Observer. The galaxy’s still broken - but it’s alive, and full of stories waiting to be told.

See you on the grid.
— Brody

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