Local Universe

The Local Universe, often called The Universe, Reality, or The Cosmos, is everything made up of matter and energy within this region of coherent spacetime. While in common parlance, this definition means "everything," scientists call it the "Local Universe," to distinguish it from other matter and energy elsewhere (explained below).

Structure & Physics

The Local Universe is a massive spinning collection of matter, all orbiting their shared center of gravity. As the galaxies slowly spiral into one another, star formation has increased as the galaxies sweep up additional dust and gas left over from the universe's formation. However, not all energy at the beginning of time formed in the same three dimensions. Some material ended up offset in the fourth dimension, forming the hidden galaxy of Inflorescence. Yet more energy is caught up in the Lux Aeterna, however, this energy is almost exclusively in the form of Thaumic Energy.

Thaumic Energy is rare in the physical universe, but is so highly concentrated in the Lux Aeterna that its energy is under a great amount of pressure. Like a ball atop a hill, Thaumic Energy from the Lux Aeterna seeks to fall toward the center of mass. Instead, it is unable to cross multi-dimensional space to reach it. This yearning to enter the physical universe is the basis of Thaumaturgy, or the manipulation of Thaumic Energy.

There are five fundamental forces governing the Local Universe—Gravity, Electromagnetism, the Strong Force, the Weak Force, and the Thaumic Force. Gravity stretches across several dimensions, explaining its significant weakness compared to the other forces.

Consciousness

The answer to the question of consciousness has been known since long before even basic interstellar travel. To be conscious is to have a pylon in the Lux Aeterna. The pylon is something like a soul, a small gateway that allows the flow of Thaumic Energy, and with it consciousness, to enter the brain. Without a pylon, most intelligent organisms cannot survive; their brains evolved to take advantage of the Lux Aeterna.

Extent

The Local Universe is something of a paradigm, a region of coherent space existing in void. Certainly other universes exist in the infinite chaos that is the Void of Creation, hence the name "Local Universe." However, these universes would be so foreign, so unlikely to even be a similar size, composition, or laws as this one, that as many as billions of smaller "universes" could be passing through each person every second. Of course, calling these other "paradigms," or regions, anything approximating a "universe" would be absurd. They hardly even qualify as spaces in their own right, and are utterly foreign. They do exist, as evidenced by the ultra-rare impacts of a small paradigm with a particle, but are utterly irrelevant. It is very likely that the "Local Universe" itself is passing through much "larger" paradigms, but there is no way to confirm or disprove this.

Hence, "Local Universe" being the commonly used name of all reality, despite the fact that it is truly all that exists in any meaningful sense. With any given atom exponentially more likely to be struck by a neutrino than a smaller paradigm that just so happens to have similar enough rules to interact with it, this is truly all that exists.

The universe is 100 million lightyears across, beyond which lies the Void of Creation, the region of space in which this paradigm, the laws of physics which govern this universe, break down and disappear. Within this universe lies trillions of stars organized into about a dozen galaxies.

The universe has about 50 trillion solar masses of material within it, bound together by ten times as much "dark matter," a slurry of countless non-interacting fundamental particles left over from the formation of the universe. Most of them also interact with all four fundamental forces, and sometimes even the Thaumic Force, but gravity is the only force they interact with on a large scale.