The World of Einea

Discussions about constructed worlds, cultures and any topics related to constructed societies.
HopeCPressF
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Re: The World of Einea

Post by HopeCPressF »

Creyeditor wrote: 14 Nov 2021 17:35 Great post. I like the general feel [:)]
Thank you! The art isn't my best, but I like the lore conceptually a lot.
dva_arla wrote: 27 Nov 2021 08:06 A fine conworld with an intricately-developed lore you've got there; and very intriguingly delivered -- There is much to be learnt presenting a conworld/alt-history from the way you do it.

What tools did you use to make the maps in the first two of your posts?
Thank you very much! I appreciate comments like that about the world I've made, it's cool that other people can enjoy it like I do. As for how I made the maps, they were hand-drawn and coloured in the app Paint Tool SAI, and the Dubcloch map had text added in Firealpaca.

Also, I have a new creature art piece and entry! I'm quite proud of this one - proud of the art, and of the way it combines speculative evolution and my world's magic.

Image

The glass fawn, known natively as the shilen-su, is a slow, mostly herbivorous amphibian that wanders the Tuuril Wood alone or in small groups. With few teeth, no fast-acting external poisons or venoms and a metabolism restrained by exothermy, it should by all means be vulnerable from predation by the Tuuril Wood's many carnivores - but this is not the case.

This is because of how magic works in the world of Einea. Magical potential energy reaches the planet along with sunlight, and certain plants (known as biwids) can absorb this. Those plants can then be metabolised by a living creature and that creature can access the interdimensional properties of that plant matter. The Tuuril Wood has one of the highest proportions of biwids vs mundane plants in the world, and one species of these, Crennin's slick, a form of arcane algae, is symbiotic with the glass fawn, and may have been for millions of years, leading to their evolved lack of other defences.

The glass fawn lacks the mental faculties to perform highly complex magical tasks, and this leads the Crennin's slick to default to its most basic form of magic when signals from the fawn's brain reach it - and that is wind. When a fawn is threatened, it can create a veritable vortex of wind that will whip up leaves, dirt and detritus to dissuade any attacker, animal or human or machine. The trees in the parts of the wood where the fawn is most common have evolved have even developed stronger roots to avoid being pulled up in these squalls.

Despite this danger, or even because of it, humans consider these creatures a delicacy, especially in the country of Inivan, north of Tilée. There, fawn intestines filled with a broth made of boiled fawn flesh are served to the richest (and most daring) people. Most daring because the creature's internal organs contain a neurotoxin which is liable to kill up to one eighth of consumers, even when prepared as safely as possible.
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Re: The World of Einea

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Very interesting idea! However
HopeCPressF wrote:
creature's internal organs contain a neurotoxin
so it doesn't require magic to be safe, since predators won't eat them?
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HopeCPressF
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Re: The World of Einea

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Titus Flavius wrote: 28 Nov 2021 20:06 Very interesting idea! However
HopeCPressF wrote:
creature's internal organs contain a neurotoxin
so it doesn't require magic to be safe, since predators won't eat them?
Good question! Neurotoxins, specifically tetrodotoxins like pufferfish and glass fawns have, affect different animals differently. What may be extremely deadly to humans may be unpleasant or of negligible effect to certain predators, so there is a possibility that some time in the glass fawn’s evolutionary past, they were under threat from a predator that was immune to this toxin - and may still be today.

Also important to note is that it’s just their internal organs that are toxic - if a fawn’s disembowelled and its predator dies, the fawn is still dead, and cannot pass on its genes. This makes the individual evolutionarily unsuccessful.
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Re: The World of Einea

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Image

In the tropical coastal waters and islands of the northern coast of Tokarey in Einea, the otteroo moves in highly social mobs, on land and on sea. Evolved from terrestrial macropods who escaped to the sea to avoid predators, otteroos have many adaptations to this lifestyle. Their bodies have become more streamlined, barrel-chested and flat-tailed. Their limbs are reduced in length, and their hind legs have become grebe-like paddles with long, webbed toes. Their fur is short and dense to provide insulation from the water, and their front limbs are unwebbed to allow them to manipulate their main source of food - aquatic plants.

Otteroo ancestors, in their short-term ocean jaunts, discovered a veritable buffet of food sources, including kelp, sea plants, soft corals, and sessile animals. Because they're quite buoyant, modern otteroos will often dig their tails into mats of sea plants or corals to act as an anchor while they feed near the ocean floor. They can hold their breath for upwards of fifteen minutes, and their main method of swimming is very energy-efficient.

One notable otteroo adaptation is that of the pouch - both males and females have them. In the case of males, this is convergent with the evolution of male pouches in the Earthling yapok, or water opossum. To put it mildly, male marsupials have pendulous gonads, which can become tangled in sea flora and are not very streamlined. Thus, males in both otteroos and yapoks have evolved a pouch to act as a kind of biological swimming underwear.
Female pouches function close to how you'd expect, with some adaptations, again similar to the yapok - they have a powerful sphincter, able to seal their young completely in a bubble of air and swim like mammalian submarines. Females must give birth on land, but can then remain at sea indefinitely with their pouched offspring, occasionally flipping onto their backs and letting some fresh air into their pouch in a behaviour morbidly called 'gull-tempting.'

Similar to the mobs of their terrestrial ancestors, otteroos are highly social, polygamous creatures, though their territories can range much further than is possible on land. Clumsy and waddling out of the water, most males fight for dominance at sea, and attempting to drown the opposing male is a common move.

The otteroo's main predators come from the sea. Einea, a world without whales, has produced many other strange creatures to fill oceanic macropredator niches that hunt otteroos, including megafaunal aquatic beetles, fully aquatic whale-sized birds, enormous sea snakes, and oceanic Spinosaurs. Otteroos must rely on their speed and agility in the water to evade these predators. A common myth in northern Tokarey states that, when desperate, nursing female otteroos will eject their young as bait and a distraction, but this has not been corroborated, and appears to be little more than a morbid fancy.

Side note: A falar, a common Einean name for an Azhdarchid pterosaur, can be seen at great distance in the top right.
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Re: The World of Einea

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I like your post about otteroos!
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Re: The World of Einea

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This is one of my favorite world building posts ever. I decided to buy your novel to support you. Let's see if I have the time to read it anytime soon. :)
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Re: The World of Einea

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Great as usual [:)]
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Re: The World of Einea

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Hello everyone! I come bearing sundry new information.
gestaltist wrote: 16 Mar 2022 17:45 This is one of my favorite world building posts ever. I decided to buy your novel to support you. Let's see if I have the time to read it anytime soon. :)
Thank you so much! I dearly hope you enjoy it. Thank you to Crey and Eldin too :)

Update: On Aliens

Einean humans are not (or at least were not) alone in the Tekran star system.

When Einean humans were little more than a twinkle in the eye of a precocious ape, another great people rose around the same star that they did. These were the Kho, originally deep-sea dwellers from the frigid subsurface ocean of the gas giant moon Akaset. After their home was rendered uninhabitable, they were forced to spread to other planets and moons, some nearby and some far, far away.

Image

Fleeing a home moon that had become completely devoid of oxygen from the seafloor up, the Kho spread throughout the star system of Tekran and beyond, genetically modifying their bodies to withstand the different biospheres, pressures, and temperatures of their new artificial and natural homes.

This one, named Ufuetse, has spent the last two centuries of their life modifying a stock of jellyfish-like organisms from Akaset to store hydrogen and float in this terraformed world's thick, wet atmosphere. This scene takes place two million years before the start of The Ancient Wound, and about a million before modern Einean humans evolved.


Some of the ways they shaped their bodies (known as genemorphs) were minimal and functional, and others were extreme - early settlers spread to floating cities in the clouds of the gas giant Akaset orbited, Yos. They made themselves small and deft to take up less space and better reach hard-to-access areas. There are rumours of Kho settling ocean worlds and twisting their bodies to become immense, kraken-like beasts kilometres across, and losing their personhood in the process.

Those are just rumours, though - especially now. By the time of The Ancient Wound, the only known Kho are terrestrial genemorphs in small enclaves in the mountains, hidden from humans, numbering in the thousands. Their access to their ancestral knowledge is truncated and believed to be myth rather than fact by many groups. These Kho exist in the minds of humans as a kind of cryptid, a uim believed to snatch children in the night, but their existence is not believed by the majority.

Whether or not other Kho in similar or different genemorphs still thrive or hang on in other worlds is unknown - perhaps it'll take humans and Kho forging an alliance and returning to the stars to find out.
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Re: The World of Einea

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How do a people who live under the water invent fire?
Or tame it?
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Re: The World of Einea

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eldin raigmore wrote: 18 Mar 2022 13:43 How do a people who live under the water invent fire?
Or tame it?
They don't! For a very long time, at least. The deoxygenation event drives them over several centuries from bottom-dwellers to living on foothills to eventually living amphibious lives in the sea and the ice layer, and then once they have access to a dry environment in the form of their new cavern homes, they discover fire.

Before that, they use rudimentary biotechnology, shaping native organisms to their whims for use in lighting, heating, and architecture.
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Re: The World of Einea

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New update! Two more creatures with their own lore, and part of a short story I'm working on.

Image

The country of Cenogé, one of the largest in the continent of Tokarey and indeed in the world of Einea, is known for many things.

These include horn music with boisterous drums, humidity, mosquitoes the size of seagulls, purple honey… and the bayous. Cenogé borders much of the inland sea Ula Mea, and is crisscrossed with rivers coming down from the immense Great Divorcing Range to its east.

By the time those rivers wind their way through the jungles and thickets and hills, they can become sluggish. This is the ideal home of the bayou beetle, a relative of the oceanic greater diving beetle that’s adapted to hunt in Cenogé’s murky bayous.

They’re smaller - three metres long instead of nine - with proportionally larger eyes with which to pierce the muck or to peer over the surface. Though they look bulky, they are capable of rapid bursts of speed, and young crocodilians, most birds, smaller mammals, and young humans aren’t safe from them.

Image

One thousand years before present, a last-ditch effort to win a war went spectacularly wrong.

The defenders were the Lefaneie - possibly the greatest magicworkers Einea has ever seen. The attackers were the Meirese, a people fed up with centuries of Lefan interference, and wanting to end it once and for all.

End it once and for all they did. The Lefaneie had a secret weapon that proved to be far more effective than they'd anticipated.

The Sudden Shock, as it has since come to be called, split the multiple dimensions, or 'layers' in which magic resides in Einean space, right down the middle. The city in which it took place, the Lefan capital, fell in to the layers beyond. These layers aren’t meant to hold physical matter, so they were twisted and disintegrated. Parts of the city's ruins rapidly transmuted into water and hair and flesh and other matter, bending out of shape, and they were transported two hundred kilometres to the east due to a failure of locality. There was a catastrophic physical explosion, too, which sent Einea as a whole into an ashy, irradiated winter for seven years. If the ash coverage had been total, all life might have been snuffed out.

Every sauropod in the world died in or soon after those seven years, and everything that had preyed upon them and couldn't adapt to smaller prey died along with them. Most pterosaurs went extinct. Most ceratopsians. Most tyrannosaurids. The world was reclaimed by the smaller, more adaptable megarthropods, dromaeosaurs, birds and mammals.

There were, of course, exceptions - like the tsuoba, a predator and scavenger that lives in Tileé and surrounding islands as of 1042 years post-Shock.

The tsuoba’s ancestors were hibernators, able to weather the long stretches of ash darkness and cold in a catatonic state for months at a time. Many of them wasted away or froze in their sleep. Those that woke fed on the cold-preserved dead, and, eventually, some of them lived to see the sun once more.

Tsuoba means ‘tundra sneaker.’ While it may not look so sneaky here, this is a male in full breeding season flush, his horns a bright yellow-red with blood. When this season is over, the horns (which are smaller on females) are near-indistinguishable from short boughs. A sleeping tsuoba can look like nothing more than a pile of snow and some firewood - or, with its summer coat, a pile of *leaves* and some firewood.

Tsuoba are opportunistic, hunting seals and oceanic platypuses at the shore, thumper beetles in the tundra plains and smaller dinosaurs and mammals in the forests. They are also remarkably quiet, tiptoeing through the snow with less sound than a human walking. When they do make noise, though, to flirt or to threaten, it's so low that it's felt rather than heard - like the onset of an earthquake.

An Excerpt of an Einean Short Story: A Boy and His Sail

The Most Holy Mondine Basilica, Canalas City, Greater Meir
817 N.M.
14 years after the end of the Iro-Canalian War
225 years before the events of The Ancient Wound
16 years after the founding of Cinura


Something I heard over and over in my year on the corps was that ‘there’s no bond quite as strong as the one between a boy and his sail.’ I think daydreaming generals came up with that one to make themselves feel better as they stooped behind cover far behind the lines and we lost our lives in the sky above them.

I was eleven when I was drafted. Yes, eleven. Do not give me that pitying stare, priest. It unmans me. Do you understand that?
Thank you. Please, just listen. It’s taken a lot of time - a lot of thought - for me to be able to sit here and tell this to you.

I was eleven, and I lived in a nowhere town. A satellite of a satellite of the capital. My family farmed goats, had done for centuries. Sometimes hunted stag beetles and sold their carapace for cheap armour. I hated it - rebelled whenever I could. Made trouble. I was a shitty kid - sorry, bad kid - and nothing my parents ever did could rein me in. I wonder if a part of them, even a small part, was relieved to see me hauled away on that cart. I won’t ever know. I never could find them.

They took us - a group of maybe fifty, nearly all boys, nearly all short and thin-framed - in these carts that we all swore must have been used to carry meat before they took us on. They stunk. They were open at the top, and the mosquitos drank their fucking - sorry, they drank their fill, egregiously so, every night on the way.

The way… that was a confusing time. They didn’t tell us much, where we were going or who we were fighting. Iroi was a martial culture, y’know? Masculine. You couldn’t cross a street in the capital without tripping over a phallic symbol. The classic Iroian man in every commemorative statue held his sword like he was wanking it off. We were told ‘you’re going to fight some people, and those people deserve it for what they’ve done to us’ and that was enough. No more elaboration. That was enough, for all of us...

End of excerpt.
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Re: The World of Einea

Post by HopeCPressF »

Hello everyone. Long time no post. Remember that map I posted first off? Well, I made a new one.

Image

And here it is with country borders.

Image

Here it is spinning.

Image

I also did two more creature drawings, which I'll be happy to expand on if anyone's interested.

Image

So, I wanted to redraw the great yawning eft, which I drew and posted here a while ago. It was one of my first digital drawings ever, and it kinda sucked.

Great yawning efts are the descendants of Andrias salamanders in Einea, a world which lacks whales taking up their niches like on Earth. Like Andrias salamanders, great yawning efts can release irritating slime, though theirs is considerably more intense than the slime released by Japanese giant salamanders, which has been compared to chilli peppers.

Prompting this release is an unspecified penguin-like pterosaur, perhaps looking to 'graze' on the eft as some animals graze on whales on Earth - but it got a bit more flavour than it bargained for.

Image

On a rock platform high above a road on the endless Teneté desert (near the centre of the central continent in the map I shared), a Tenetéan corpse-eater observes. It is known in the world of Einea as a falar, coming from an old imperial phrase meaning 'the sail of the sky,' but we on earth would call it a pterosaur, or more specifically an Azhdarchid. The corpse-eater has evolved a shorter, strong neck and enormous wings with which to effortlessly glide on the thermals coming off the baking desert sands.

About seven feet tall, the corpse-eater with its hollow bones is fragile compared to larger predators that roam the desert, and will only land and feast from carcasses that are unattended, or only being fed on by smaller, less dangerous creatures. Its beak has evolved to break the skin of carcasses and pinpoint their most nutritious viscera, extracting and eating that first to save both time and energy. Their beaks are not built for tearing tough hides, however, and one may soar in circles above a carcass for several days, sleeping on the wing, until decomposition or a stronger scavenger opens their food up for them.

Though not particularly friendly to humans, corpse-eaters do not pose any active danger to them except in that any small wounds from their beaks are very likely to become septic. There are other falars that patrol the Teneté that rival the extinct Terran Hatzegopteryx and Quetzalcoatlus in size, and these are active hunters rather than scavengers - so humans trudging through Einea's biggest desert don't tend to spend time worrying about corpse-eaters.
Last edited by HopeCPressF on 11 Aug 2022 14:52, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The World of Einea

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I am always most interested in your description of Einea's fauna.
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Re: The World of Einea

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Creyeditor wrote: 11 Aug 2022 14:46 I am always most interested in your description of Einea's fauna.
Awesome! It's been updated with some info.
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Re: The World of Einea

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I also enjoy your physical map much more than your first political map [:)]
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Re: The World of Einea

Post by Keenir »

*catching up*

sweet map - still and moving - and fauna. excellent work on them all.
At work on Apaan: viewtopic.php?f=6&t=4799
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Re: The World of Einea

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Hello everyone! This project is still very much alive - I don't imagine it's going to be dead any time soon. Wanna see/read some more stuff?

Writing Update
A while ago I linked my first book, The Ancient Wound, a fantasy novel set in Einea (linked for purchase https://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Wound-Fi ... B097XHZ58N that follows a city in the leadup to and in the throes of a rebellion. I am currently about 30% done with the first draft of its sequel, Mud on the Boots of Kings, aiming for publishing next year, which follows characters from the city now facing the difficulties of independence and establishing new alliances.

Worldbuilding Updates - The Rise and Fall of the Kho
In March of last year, I wrote about an alien named Ufuetse, one of the Kho, a significant species in the Tekran system. In the intervening year I've written quite a lot about their kind - let me share some of that with you. This may be somewhat subject to change. Probably not, though. I plan to write this into a grand novel inspired by Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time eventually, but there's so much stuff here that I could hardly spoil it.

1.38 million years before present, on a tiny ice moon orbiting a gas giant in the Tekran stellar system, stomatopod-like people began to build villages...

Pre-Enlightenment

1.38 MYA
The first Kho villages are built at the bottom of the World Sea in Akaset.

1.18 MYA
The great deoxygenation of the World Sea begins, forcing the Kho up undersea mountains to live in the moon’s ice layer.

1.17 MYA
The deoxygenation event ends, having killed most aquatic life except that in the upper water column and the ice.

1.17 - 1.08 MYA
Thousands and then millions of Kho settlements are built into the ice with easy access to the World Sea.

1.06 MYA
An equatorial population is the first to successfully farm World Sea plants in air using chemicals sifted from the water column.

1.04 MYA
Knowledge of agriculture and selective breeding spreads through the settlements, many now connected by tunnels.

~5,000 years later
The first of the great Kho houses form with the first cities. Motes, bioluminescent organisms, are bred to light them.

~4,420 years later
Motes are even brighter and more common. Electricity is first harnessed.


The First of the Four Enlightened Eras - The Computer Age

~200 years later.
The first computers are developed. The Kho begin to wonder at the wider world beyond their icy homes. Railways are established between cities.

50 years later.
The Perennial Lattice is created, a historian, robot and data storage device in one. It gorges itself on mythology and ancient history.

18 years later.
Kho scientists send a manned mission to Akaset’s surface, there is a containment failure, and they are all killed by the vacuum.

32 years later.
In a second, more cautious attempt, a remote drone sent to the surface controlled by the Perennial Lattice is the first Akasetian to see the stars.

56 years later.
The first base is established on Akaset’s surface.

5 years later.
A threshold is passed. The Perennial Lattice achieves sapience, just like its creator thought it would, soon after its 111th ‘birth’ day. (Akasetian 'day,' 'month' and 'year' equivalents are measured by the biorhythms of their lighting motes.)

55 years later.
The first significant inter-citystate war occurs in Akaset. Nuclear weapons are used and three city-states are completely destroyed. A hole is blasted to the surface.

100 years later.
With the help of the Perennial Lattice, now a respected statesperson, the rest of Akaset is rebuilt, and the crater is transformed into a staging ground for space launches.

20 years later.
The first manned missions are sent to photograph Yos, the planet Akaset orbits, and some of its other moons.


The Time of the Mote Plague

37 years later.
The Mote Plague, an infectious disease that spreads between the ubiquitous bioluminescent organisms that light Kho cities, homes and technology, mutates into a deadly form.

1.03 MYA

15 years later.

A cure for the disease is found - only after it has killed 98% of Akaset’s population of twelve billion.

350 years later.
Society re-establishes itself, slowly, but a deleterious gene has spread through the remainder of the population that causes death before sexual maturity - many can no longer breed. If this gene continues to spread, extinction is a distinct possibility.

12 years later.
A Kho is born into this situation and, after seeking out and finding the Perennial Lattice in an old ruin, develops a method of genetic engineering to remove the deleterious gene.

200 years later.
Over the next two centuries, the population stabilises and begins to grow again. The Perennial Lattice gains the status of a god, teaching these new people of the old world. History essentially restarts from a backup.


The Interstellar Age

1200 years later.
The Kho population is in the billions once more, and now with advanced genetic engineering technology their biotechnology industry explodes. They enter a new space age, visiting and establishing bases on or around Yos, other moons, and wishing on foreign stars.

1.02 MYA
The first non-baseline Kho are made in labs in Akaset and some of Yos’s other moons for habitation of new planets. The first high-definition images of Einea and its moons are taken.

1.01 MYA
Akaset is hit by another, less devastating plague, leading to an exodus of billions. Genemorphs diversify immensely, for living in space habitats, on other worlds - even in the clouds of Yos.

300 years later.
The first Genemorph War Occurs. Many nuclear weapons are used. One of Yos’s moons are destroyed, along with many bubble cities on Akaset’s surface.

500 years later.
The Kho continue to disperse through the stellar system and the galaxy.


Middagh and the Fall

1 MYA

Seeing that it has life of its own, Kho attempt to settle Einea, but are unable to due to its (relatively) immense gravity. With no appropriate genemorph, they instead build habitations on its largest moon, Middagh, and plan to terraform it with Einean life via drone in order to prepare for a later colonisation of the planet.

900,000 YA
The terraforming of Middagh begins in earnest. The home government of Akaset rule that the Perennial Lattice should be sent there, to record the event, and it is so.

880,000 YA
Middagh is now green and full of Einean life, but genemorphs have been made for the high gravity of Einea and all have died horribly. Discontent grows between the terraforming workers and the planners, the ‘visionaries.’ The lattice is reluctant to choose a side.

879,980 YA
The visionary class begin to construct weapons on the now-green Middagh in order to protect themselves in the event of a worker uprising. They are advised by the Lattice.

879,945 YA
The war comes, and the visionary class exterminate the worker class almost entirely with chemical weapons, save for a few hangers-on saved by Lattice intervention. They are now unable to control the terraforming process, and their palaces are overrun and overgrown and most die from exposure or predation.

879,892 YA
The remnants of both groups, now adapted for much harsher living, band together, still harbouring grudges, but wishing to keep their collective knowledge alive.

879,820 YA
Sensors on Middagh pick up something catastrophic - many signals from other Kho populations spread out throughout the solar system and galaxy go dark. The Kho on Middagh, aside from a few ‘minders’ who watch the terraforming technology, go into stasis.

454,658 YA
The stasis technology finally wakes up the non-minders, far later than had been intended. This appears to be a mistake, but is actually deliberate sabotage by the minders, who have also placed Kho on the surface of Einea some time about 200,000 years before. They now use technology that they have developed in the interim to control the other Kho groups like machinery. They enforce a pastoral, agricultural, stagnant subsistence existence for over 200,000 years.

234,756 YA
A once-in-a-million-years solar flare from Tekran, the solar system’s star, disables the minders’ control, and the non-minders tear them apart. They nearly destroy the Lattice, but think better of it.

234,751 YA
The remaining Middaghish Kho take stock of what they have - and it isn’t much. Most of their technology is broken except for the terraforming devices and the Lattice. Thinking of the populations of Kho on Einea, probably lost and struggling, they send historian computers - ‘children of the Lattice’ - down to each of their settlements, in an attempt to catch them up.

201,095 YA
Observers on Middagh see the lights of campfires on the surface of Einea for the first time - humans have arrived with no apparent explanation, accompanied only by a very faint signal leading to Einea from somewhere far, far away.

201,095 YA
Observers on Middagh see the lights of campfires on the surface of Einea for the first time - humans have arrived with no apparent explanation, accompanied only by a very faint signal leading to Einea from somewhere far, far away.


Now, all this time later, small communities of Kho live isolated from each other and from their progenitors on the green moon, known only to humans as cryptids and frightening bedtime stories.

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Sure, the Kho probably don't have bad intentions - but can you blame a human for not wanting to bump into this in the night?
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