In 2280, a deep-range exploration ship went missing. The Search and Rescue ship that went to retrieve it and its crew also vanished. After a third ship vanished, the Galactic Union set Warning Buoys around the area, warning other travelers not to enter lest they, too, vanish.
Most of the smaller governments heeded the buoys, but the Xaryndian Alliance chose to explore the area instead. Knowing that other ships had vanished, and not knowing where they had gone any more than anyone else did, they took certain precautions. The ship they sent into that space was equipped with a Dimensional Drive that would allow them to transit back to their home universe should they get stranded somewhere.
It didn't work.
Oh, they indeed did get stranded, but when they tried to activate their Dimensional Drive, it siphoned power from every other system on the ship but still could not draw enogh power to fully activate to take them home. They were stuck in the new universe they found themselves in, at least until they could build a better drive or find another way home.
Fortune was on their side in this, however. The ship that the Xaryndian crew encountered towed them into a nearby station, and the ship was repaired. The station was owned by a company called ShadowDragon Enterprises, and that company helped them repair their ship. It also sent a scout ship to the coordinates where the Xaryndian crew said they had entered this universe; and, as had happened on the other side, this ship vanished. It, however, did not find itself in the universe the Xaryndians had come from. But it did have an engine capable of taking it home.
When the scout returned and reported what had happened, the company's owner Ashlyn of Koryndell decided that this place bore further examination. So in the next six years, she sent ships to investigate. What her ships discovered was that this area of space was a sort of Nexus. At that particular spot in space, a multitude of universes connected, but they did so randomly. Ashlyn put her people to work, and they designed a system to "tame" the random currents of the area enough to allow for the creation of a station in that place that would "straddle" the universal boundaries created by the Nexus and act as a sort of gate keeper of the Nexus. That system came in the form of an artificial planet. To oversee both the machinery at the planet's core and what came and went through the Nexus, a station was built in orbit. The planet itself was habitable, designed to be so.
The planet Ashlyn called Crossroads, and the station she named Crossroads Station.
She did not think that its mission would be best served by staffing it with her people since they were mercenaries. Instead, she employed an independent agency to choose staff for it. That agency chose people from many of the universes that could be reached through the Multiversal Crossroads (what they had named the Nexus), creating an atmosphere of diversity that started at the top.
The year is now 2480. The multiverse is a large and chaotic place, and that chaos will come here... to Crossroads Station.