Shadowy but jocular agency that is open about existing but denies it's reach, power, and reason for being.
Any agent of the agency gives a different description of the agency's mission, history, purpose or meaning making it obvious they are there to obscure their real purpose and reach.
Agents of "the agency" are super skillfully elusive and great at non denial denials and elusive answers to questions.
They have outposts on many planets but not all.
They are open about existing but not much else. They present themselves as religious outreach, a local mining operation, a philanthropic organization, etc
Their purpose and actual history can be generated and based on player choice.
Agents should be friendly and anodyne. They should not be obviously sinister except in their ubiquity and blindingly obvious deception
They have a cool symbol that looks like it could be anything. You see it randomly.
An agency guy can be following you, always just out of reach or acting totally innocent when confronted
What do they want? Is that determined by player choice?
If the player is goodheart they are a demonic agency. If the player is not clever they never figure it out. They could be a super professional criminal organization or actually just a small outreach of the people who really run the world.
They're really mostly scenery unless you crack into their world. Maybe trickiness is key.
Maybe you can like dig in their dumpsters and find super weird random shit.
You've come to a quiet place on the planet, an incredibly deep lake with a mirror-like surface. Mountains are reflected, and you can see every detail. Somehow the water makes their detail even clearer. You look into your own heart and in that one moment you see it in the same clarity and feel subtly changed.
There is pathway leading up into some hills here. The pathway is made of shiny, round stones placed perfectly, spaced almost exactly the same distance apart. You haven't seen any being that would have been able to create a path of such craftsmanship. You follow the path for almost a mile, leaping from shiny marbled surface to surface.
In the distance you see a great beast, some Cretaceous monster, peacefully laying the step stones, one after another, from an orifice in its body.
Some small spacecraft has crashed here, into a sleestak, a spire that was unexpected in its low survey of the ground. The craft is crushed almost beyond recognition, and weeds have begun to grow around them and dull their profile.
You find a pit, filled with millions of shining, black larva. At first they seemed to be a liquid.
you see a fat root that has broken through the layers of rock from the soil beyond. There are a few, scrabbly leaves, and one giant scabrous fruit. It resembles nothing more than a
the tunnel begins to narrow, just a few inches every hundred feet. Eventually you begin to need to turn your body at an angle to continue to walk, and even further need to push forward, breathing more shallowly. You can see the tunnel turns up ahead, but you can't push yourself in any further without getting stuck.
a complete, featureless, dead end.
a crack, from which molten lava forms a bubbling little spring. -> Touch the lava -> It burns your hand. Why did you do that?
a tiny, crude shrine of some kind. A hard, nutty local fruit called a Eleenosos has been whittled into a likeness of some higher being both lumpy and sincere in appearance. Below it, on a small shelf, are various offerings of food, now completely desiccated.
a place where your progress is completely blocked by stalagmites and stalactites. Stalactites hold "tite" to the ground, but stalagmites "mite" fall on your head. Or... is it the other way around?
a rock formation that makes you think of a fun song you used to hear when you were a small child. You stop and sing it in your head for a moment. Man those days were great.