Throughout most of Mankind’s history, the planet Venus was surrounded by mystery and myth. The ancients knew it as the “Morning Star” and it was associated with such various deities as the Hebrew’s Lucifer and the Greek’s Aphrodite. In the 19th and early 20th Centuries A.D. astronomers believed that underneath it’s planet-wide layer of clouds was a humid world of oceans and jungles populated by dinosaurs. However, in the 1960’s, when the first spacecraft studied the planet up close, they discovered that the surface of Venus was less like Aphrodite’s paradise and more like Lucifer’s hell. It’s clouds, it turned out, were made of sulphuric acid. It’s atmosphere mostly carbon dioxide, with pressures that could crush a car and temperatures that could melt lead.
      When Mankind began to colonise the Solar System in earnest, the 4th millenium A.D., it was because of Venus’ hellish conditions that it would not become terraformed until centuries after Mars. The first early attempts were made by the Chinese in the late 32nd Century and it wasn’t until the end of the 39th Century that the process would be complete. After the Terraformation, Venus was no longer a hellish world of sulphuric acid, but began to resemble the world envisioned by early astronomers with humid oceans and jungles lying underneath a planet-wide layer of clouds - no longer sulphuric acid, but now mostly water vapour.


      In the 37th Century, nearly three hundred years before the Terraformation was complete, the planet was claimed by a group of interplanetary cyborgs (descendents of Asian cyborgs exiled from Earth after the Great Machine War) led by the infamous Ichi Hiroma. It was they and their descendents who would ultimately settle and colonise the planet, and for millenia afterwards, Venus would remain a world populated by Asiatics.
      For the majority of the next ten thousand years, while Earth was controlled by the immense and powerful Terran Autocracy, Venus would remain mysterious and aloof, carrying out it’s own history under it’s clouds and worrying itself little with the concerns of the rest of the universe.