====== Second Golden Age ======

After the War of Dissolution, the Pious Dissolutionists were now in control of the Bright Way. They promptly sold off the infrastructure that wasn't seized by force or destroyed, which put quite a bit of money in their paws. Nearly all of that money was funneled into interstellar mission work, spurring a brief second golden age for the missionaries, who were exiled from their former home in the Outer Belt and were now based out of Moonlitter. However, without the sustained cash flow from the corporate side of the Bright Way, meager though it was, the golden age quickly ended. Where the Bright Way once was able to completely pay several whole mission control teams for missions lasting a millennium or more, by the time of First Contact they could barely manage a single unpaid volunteer to puppysit the crew of the _Dewfall_ part time.

Indeed, during the centuries leading up to First Contact, the missionaries were rocked by scandal after scandal, almost always involving former missionaries becoming gelheads or  traffickers of gelhead paraphernalia. Neurogel, as well as amnions gutted from spent or even unlaunched womb ships, would end up on the black market. High Hearthkeeper Brightsun, the predecessor to High Hearthkeeper Lucy, repeatedly discussed suppressing the missionaries, citing these scandals as the chief reason. Unlike her predecessor 66 millennia prior, Brightsun was met with only feeble murmurs of resistance from the devout core of the missionaries and traditionalist groups like the ones Iris ran with. By that point it seems most Wayfarers tacitly regarded the missionaries as an embarrassing relic of the past, though it should be noted that Brightsun's suppression would only apply to interstellar missions, not to Wayfinding (remotely surveying potential life bearing worlds and broadcasting messages in their direction.) An organization that had once produced so many glorious saints and martyrs was now only known for gelheads.

{{tag>bright_way history}}