Fort_Master_Gustav
Hadraas cleared his throat, still clearly peeved about the patronization, though for now keeping quiet in that regard.
H: "If I am not mistaken, the original objective of these endeavours was to ascertain the origin of the Vaiaelon. With regards to the success of the procedures, I do believe I can safely shed some light on that subject. It's no short story, so if you intend to listen I'd get comfortable."
R: "Just a moment, what of the operatives?" He gestured around them.
H: "My machinations are psychomemetic in nature. If they can't hear the words in the first place, they won't be affected by them."
R: "...I suppose I have as much reason to doubt you as I do to trust you, proceed."
H: "Good good, now where do I start..."
The two large vulpine creatures laid down on the smooth metal platform surrounding Hadraas' contraptions. Not the most comfortable of spots, but if sufficed.
"...I suppose I should start at this, uhm, 'tree'. Now it's the last of its kind left in the galaxy, but obviously that wasn't always the case. The tree itself is sentient, they all were, though their true name has been lost to time. Vastly complex systems more akin to self-contained ecosystems than traditional organisms. They live for many hundreds of thousands of years, functionally immortal. Many millennia ago, they had a spacefaring civilisation of their own, though still barely numbered in the thousands population wise."
"Their primary issue was their glacially slow perception and cognition; what passes as months and years for us would seem like seconds and minutes to them. This caused their galactic neighbours, your average run-of-the-mill human nations, to largely disregard them, their experiences of reality so fundamentally different that arranging any meaningful ties would be more effort than it was worth, at least in their eyes. The plantoids, as I'll call them for simplicity's sake, grew to resent them because of this. Their wants unheard and their needs unheeded, they conspired to fight for their recognition. A conventional war would've been suicide of course; low numbers, reproduction rates, and slow cognition simply wouldn't allow it. Another solution was needed... a proxy."
"Over the course of a millennia, a new weapon was developed. A weapon to surpass anything they'd had before (I had to). A creature, designed at every level to counter the nations opposing the plantoids. Stronger, faster, and more resilient than a human. Externally designed to play off of humanity's animalistic fears. Able to reproduce at obscene rates to recover losses with ease. Even the way their ingenuity was encoded ensured they'd naturally invent technologies and tactics to counter their intended target without even realising. The piece de resistance was their souls, specifically modelled to have enemy psionic attacks simply wash over them, causing no damage. ...I think you see where this is going."
"A very important factor that proved more deciding with age was the way they were 'created'. There didn't have to be any large scale obvious colonisation efforts to get them onto their feet and draw attention, there wasn't even the need for cloning facilities of any sort. All that was needed was a brief expedition, if at all. A remotely operated vessel could search out suitable planets, burrow deep into it, and from there manipulate every aspect it could need to. Terraforming, life seeding, evolutionary interference, targeted mutation, so on and so forth. The exact methods may have differed, but these vessels would all eventually output the same resultant creatures, ready with their own navy, and entirely predisposed to accept plantoid orders."
"They sent hundreds of these vessels out, and over the millennia one by one they reported back 'mission complete'... but in the end it was all folly. The plantoids' hubris proved to be their downfall. In the time they had taken to amass their armies, the humans had already far surpassed them in technology. When the war finally did break out, it was a mutual slaughter for all involved. The sheer mass of numbers the plantoids commanded allowed them to do their fair share of damage to the humans, destroying a good dozen worlds in their wake, but it couldn't compare to what they received. It was a genocide... incendiary munitions dropped by the millions onto creatures largely made of wood... the bastards..."
"As far as I'm aware, there was only one survivor out of the whole species. The original creator of the creatures, funnily enough, though perhaps not a coincidence. They had fled their home once they had recognised the direction the war was headed, the rest either too prideful or too stupid to see the same. Eventually they found their refuge; a seeded world still in its early development, too early for it to have appeared on any maps. They made their way to where the capsule was, intending to wait for the whole situation to blow over. While there they had an odd moment of... benevolence, I suppose would be the term, though I'm still not quite sure where it came from. They fiddled with the settings on the vessel, adjusting the target creature to be less of a killing machine and more... well, a creature."
"The war and the genocide ran its course, stranding the plantoid where he sat. The creatures, no, populace of the planet developed on their own once past the vessel's parameters. They grew to inhabit their home, granting it the name 'Aruz', and themselves... 'Vaiaelons'."
"...I'd like to let all that sink in, but the story doesn't quite end there, still a few loose ends."
"The by now infamous 'Old War' that happened not too long ago, the humans fought there were what remained of the ones who fought the plantoids millennia earlier. The grand majority of their once tens of trillions strong population had undergone some sort of ascension. I won't pretend to know the details, since I don't, but those who stayed behind were the spiritual equivalent of luddites, rejecting the more advanced technologies left behind by their brethren, instead settling for older tech, and much more complacent living conditions. When the VWP first made contact with them, they recognised the vulpine creatures as some offshoots of the beasts their ancestors had written about, hence their extreme prejudice. The reason you were able to beat them at all after being pushed to the brink of forced extinction was the same genetic predisposal to countering them specifically you had been designed with."
"And finally, the creator... this 'tree' behind me. Through some hybridisation of technology, biology, and psionics, they retain the ability to 'possess' a Vaiaelon for their own needs, the resulting psyche being a sort of splice between that of the plantoid and the 'host'. Hence... me. Hello on behalf of an extinct species, I guess."
His lengthy lecture over, 'Hadraas' let out a chuckle, followed by a long sigh.
H: "I do apologise, it has been quite some time since I recounted that. There's probably a few inaccuracies and biases here and there, but I assure you the majority of it rings true... Say what you will, hell, kill me if you want, I stopped really caring about 7 centuries ago."
R: "I... I'll need a minute..."
Raasha walked off, leaving the Ambassador alone with the quite unusual creature.