This game has a few questions that the rulebook intentionally does not answer. Your GM may not know the answers either. They are not hidden truths waiting to be uncovered through clever play. They are open spaces that each campaign fills in differently.
The big three:
1. What are the Paths, really? What's outside them? The Paths exist. They connect worlds. Beyond that, nobody knows — not Solace, not the scholars, possibly not anyone. Your GM may have ideas. Your character may have theories. Different campaigns will arrive at different truths.
2. What's wrong with Solace? You will sense, sooner or later, that something is off about your employer. The cheerfulness is too uniform. The redactions are too many. The silences are too pointed. Something is wrong. What that wrong actually is — corruption, conspiracy, alien influence, accumulated bureaucratic horror, something Solace itself doesn't know about — is for your table to discover. Or not.
3. Some characters' own pasts. A few of the Backgrounds — the Anomaly, the Recovered, the Stranded — explicitly carry questions that you, the player, may not know the answers to. That's deliberate. Lean into it. The GM may not know either, and that's fine. The truth emerges through play.
You have permission to theorize. You have permission to be wrong. You have permission to change your character's mind as the campaign reveals more. Productive mystery is the texture this game is made of. Embrace it.