The Old

The Old is the common name for a race of extremely advanced beings with nearly infinite lifetimes (thanks to transferring their consciousnesses into artificial bodies) that live in the Sagittarius Elliptical Dwarf. They are mostly dormant with very few of their small number doing anything. They do, however, help some younger civilizations, mostly with technology and achieving peace and prosperity (see Client States).

Client states
Tal'Akkur - A race of insectoids with a very peaceful and efficient bureaucratic system.

Alvuri - A race of almost dragon-like reptillians who are renowned for being highly intelligent and rational individuals.

Frames
Frames are the bodies that The Old use. They are absolute marvels of engineering and they have no rival in any of the nearby galaxies. They are many and varied, but their systems are nearly identical (with exceptions) and they all use the same material (or variants of it). It is called "Flowing Metal" in their language, and after being "programmed" into a specific set of movements it never leaves them except under extreme conditions (the hearts of supernovae, neutron stars, etc.). It is possible that they developed a technology that allowed them to control material on a molecular basis, but much is unknown about its manufacturing and properties, even among themselves, since the masters of their manufacture perished or had gone insane (except for one, and he not divulge their secret even to his kin).

Each Frame is custom-tailored to its wearer and has unique armaments and abilities. You can find about any type of armament imaginable among The Old. Plasma weapons, EMPs, rocket launchers, laser drills, energy swords, they have it all. All Frames are capable of flight in space and in most atmospheres (with two exceptions) and have an almost inexhaustible core of super-concentrated energy. Today, there aren't any empty Frames except for a few hundred basic ones in three caches, one of them in the Valkyr System and the other two at relatively remote bases. Those, however, lack standard powercores and are the emergency transfer bodies. They are mostly the defects from manufacture.

History
Originally, The Old were a race of humanoids with about 150-200 year lifespans. They started augmenting their bodies a few thousand years A.U. (after unification) and started building bodies a few thousand years later. Their lifespans lengthened and a hundred thousand years A.U. lifespans tens of thousands of years long were commonplace and their minds started to become more and more complicated. They grew and colonized a large part of the Sagittarius dwarf galax, having discovered superluminal drives a long time ago. At 500,000 A.U. they had developed "Flowing Metal" and development of Frames as they are today started. At around 1M A.U. Frames as they are today were perfected and The Old became essentially immortal.

However, there was a small portion of The Old that wanted dominion over the others and soon after the perfection of the Frames they started building Frames capable of destroying other ones with some sort of disintegration system (it is unknown how it worked). In 160,081,241, they started a war with themselves, assassinating most of the Master Craftsmen right at the start and killing hundreds of thousands with their couple thousand of killers and declared their ultimatum. The very last three Master Craftsmen that survived the initial onslaught managed to get hold of one of the enemy Frames (with the help of one who betrayed the betrayers) and reverse-engineered their technology into small grenade-like devices. The majority eventually managed to destroy the conquerors and wiped them out to a man, with the exception of the one who repented near the start. The war lasted nearly a thousand years, however, and all but the last Master Craftsman perished along with most of the civilization. Nearly 90% of the population died (ironically after becoming essentially gods) and most of the structures they built. The last few after the so-called War of Gods stopped nearly all of their activity, with only a handful going out and some drones to continue their research. They have become sages in most everything and they probably know more about the universe than anyone else in their nearby vicinity. One had ventured out into the Milky Way and met the Terran Alliance, though they never find out who or what The Old were. They also observed the Rin (and occasionally sabotaged them) and helped multiple civilizations in remote places of the Way, which are one of the few places that actually know of these ancient beings.