Copernicus Station was a CAN research colony with a substantial NERG facility, headed by Doctor Matthew Walters. Doctor Walters ran the ‘bug farm’, where the NERG were trying to engineer insects to survive on the surface of Mars, although Walters had taken the further step of splicing human and insect DNA to create foul hybrids. When the rifts erupted through the solar system, Copernicus Station was caught in a window area and effectively shifted into a pocket dimension. With all non-essential work to be shut down to concentrate on this unprecedented crisis, Walters took the step of releasing his ‘bugs’ into the colony – although something in their genes made them susceptible to magic energy, and soon the bugs grew up to be supernatural killing machines. As the situation became increasingly desperate, the colony turned to the man who had doomed them for a solution – and Walters gave them his bristle flies. They proved to be voracious predators of the other bugs, but also of the surviving humans. When the colony’s AI system, Marvin, came under the sway of Walters, the survivors were doomed. Eventually all human life was extinguished, and a new resident moved in – Enlil, a powerful entity from elsewhere who found it easy to command the simple minds of the bugs.

Years later, the shifter known simply as The First made contact with Enlil, and began transporting the bristle flies to Earth to form a dark army. When the party took the fight to The First, they ended up being rifted to Copernicus, where they uncovered the history of the place, awoke Marvin, and eventually came face to face with Enlil. Taking a disliking to this sinister entity, they rigged the colony’s fusion reactor to blow, earning the ire of Marvin. Fighting off both an alien god and a homicidal AI, the party fled through the dimensional veil, ending up in a very strange version of Mars…