Project Synapse

Background
The gnomes of Illanysh and the goblins of Zalkheed very rarely agree on anything in the current era, especially not business ventures. This is because of the disastrous results of the last business venture they jointly collaborated on. The project was called Synapse; the idea was to create a “false reality” in which test subjects could be entered into and live as if they we actually in the false reality. The experimenters would then greatly increase the rate of time passage in this false reality in the hopes that the increased passage of time would give them insight into future scientific, mystic, and cultural progress. The test subjects would experience a lifetime in the span of a few years, and when they finished their time in Synapse they would be paid and have their memories erased of what happened in the false reality.

For ten years, this project continued without any signs of complications. Until the first set of test subjects all suddenly started dying of natural causes. Even young members of very long lived races would suddenly kill over without any explanation. Afraid that the other nations would discover their project, the experimenters decided to change their contract terms, instead of the memory wipe and release they had been doing before, they would take in criminals from all over the realm, and plug them into Synapse as penance for their crimes. The other nations even paid them for the opportunity to get rid of their most dangerous criminals. When a criminal's alter self died in the simulation, they wiped their memories, created a new avatar, and put them right back in the program. After four or five lives in Synapse, the criminal would die and they disposed of the body. No mess, no one came looking for them.

Everything was going well, until the number of criminals in Synapse reached a critical point and the false reality suffered an apocalyptic event. The crisis was nearly avoided, but the nations of this reality were replaces with super corporations and the world became a dystopian nightmare. The experimenters continued the program, recording everything they could of value, while stopping the practice of adding new subjects into the world. After ten years passed and all of the subjects had died, they shut the laboratory down for good.

Hundreds of years passed and the truth about project synapse was lost to time until the invention of the Empyrean race by a froup of Gnome engineers. This first sentient mechanical being was given access to all knowledge that the Gnomes had acquired over their time in the current realm and given a single purpose: bring criminals to justice. Merely hours after it was brought online, the robot apparently went mad, talking about "missing evidence" and "the creators must be punished". It then locked itself into an old collapsed tunnel trying to dig through the fallen rubble. A group of outsiders were brought in to figure out what was wrong with the robot and disable it if necessary, and in the process the secret lab was rediscovered.