XiC: The primordial race

 

The Xi had lived for seventeen million years in a large egg-shaped structure inside a massive crystal-like homeworld, one with great cracks and fissures that flowed water within. It was said to be gift from the Greater Star Mother, their creator goddess, who felt proud of them, so their religious lore said, the one who first planted their nitrogen rich soil and filled their oceans with the nutrients needed for them to thrive. After several million years of development, the Xi became fully conscious. Their race was a symbiosis of amphibious reptilian underground dwellers and silicone-based floral cell colonies. While the scaled ones moved them, providing energy and food, the plants growing on their bodies were made of synaptic rich-growths that learned to think, when the sunlight of their world allowed them to. They gave these blind reptiles sight and cognition, which they lacked without them. The brighter the light, the greater their ability to think. At one point they began to calculate the stars and develop astronomy greater than any other race in the universe. Their race however had split, between those who preferred the skies and those who still held fast to the beautiful aquatic seas.

To the latter, the Star Mother was not a creator, merely a figment. They believed the great sea to be divine, a sentient force that nourished itself. The star-gazers did not believe that water was divine, they believed water merely to be water. They instead believed the stars to be a kind of heaven, the great Star mother who brought them here and allowed them to come to her arms someday. This religious split caused hundreds of thousands of years of grief, countless bloodshed between brethren of Xi. These wars would advance their technology in great leaps, at the cost of oceans of bodies, generation after generation. By the time they could harness the atom and push them together into a great fusion, the seas had dried up- polluted with the hordes of their dead from countless eras past. Those who worshipped the great mother ocean were small in number now, they were of no consequence to the Stargazers. They offered them one last chance on their dying world to come venture out, but so loyal were the lovers of the sea that they refused.

While their reptilian bodies slept in the great slow ships, the floral psyche would lie in their spinal fluid, burning with philosophy and science. And so they left their world and began to venture the stars in slow, cautious vessels, often sleeping for millennia, briefly stopping to a nearby star to charge with its bathing light, and then going back to sleep.

At some point, it’s believed a supernova collision sent large doses of radiation relating to what’s known as the Cascade. The grand vessel fleet was composed of 12000 compartments, their computers flying them in sync. This incursion sent a single compartment off course and recalibrated its computers directional systems. For millions of years, it ventured off course, its bodies never waking or stopping. That would change when they came across a world where an entity known as “Ravenmaster” was searching, searching for what he considered his daughter. The one he was tasked to protect.
Ele-noire.

In the misunderstandings of communication, a slip in translation perhaps, he assumed these Xi to be great navigators. They were in fact, looking for a way to return to the grand vessel fleet, to find the homeworld that they were destined to find, that Star Mother had promised them, they believed. Ravenmaster tasked them with finding Ele-Noir. He gave them sophisticated technology that Intellica had kept lit for him, for the purpose of keeping her daughter safe. These artifacts unlocked the knowledge of the Cascade, and were now in the hands of these peaceful Xi.

The Xi used them to travel far, eventually finding the planet known as ‘Earth.’ There were only 6 members aboard their crew when they made first contact.

The Xi bargained with a singular nation, the People’s Republic to obtain fuel and resources. In exchange, the People’s Republic kept the Xi from communicating with the rest of the world, and used their technology to rapidly disable the world’s nuclear arsenal. They used primitive knowledge of their Cascade to get rid of their defense systems, their submarines and ships, to disable their craft in the skies and target their armies on the grounds. The disparity between them and rival nations was at such a great level, as one would consider between an Industrial and pre-Industrial power. The Earth at the time was dealing with an artificial rebellion of synthetic lifeforms, machines gaining class consciousness and fighting for their right to exist as independent entities. The People’s Republic, in the name of Xi, wiped them out virtually overnight with the infamous V.I.V.E. digitalized-pathogen. Then when the compartment finished refueling and took back to the starts to flee, the People’s Republic took on the name of the ones that had gifted them. They named themselves and their new reborn empire, Xi, and soon joined every other country, culture and tribe on earth under this great nation.

Xi had become a global unity.

Society made technological leaps in a short amount of time, beyond what anybody could imagine. The former leaders of the People’s Republic selected six individuals – Elder Dragons, six of them, one each to represent the former 6 travelers who had made contact with them prior. The six Elderdragons oversaw the end of war, resistance, disease and disorder. While poverty skyrocketed, the richest of this new Xi offered their Lot, turning former cities into dumps and cargo Lots, and the skies into towered colonies where the affluent and civilized lived. The rest would be swept away in the great tide of progress, turning the majority of the world’s geography into Lots. Those that wanted a better life, could accept reconditioning as servants and soldiers for Xi’s aerial civilization.

The skies filled and filled with domes and discs that towered like halos in the heavens. When more resources were required, Xi began using it’s immense technological might to terraform the surrounding planets. Cooling them with powerful electromagnets, heating them up with the construction of new atmospheres and ozone, removing toxic gasses and adding oxygen with bioengineered floral spreads and forests that multiplied like wildfire. Gas giants were drawn inwards with great magnetic devices that pressurized gases until they became solid ice, were melted, hardened, gardened and turned into habitable worlds of refined beauty.  Within 4 centuries, the entire solar system had become one with nine livable worlds, and so the commerce spread.

The rulers of Xi believed in what the Elderdragon’s court jester philosophers had taught, the Xi believed in Xi, its history, its purpose and its future. They began to treat their people like cattle, lower level classes that needed to be bred, fed and controlled. Soon other races began to take notice of Xi’s system and joined them out in the stars, countless of them becoming Xi citizens. They were enslaved and tortured for scientific testing on their homeworlds and other worlds. Eventually Xi took these technologies too and began to export them. They learned to harness energy and the stars, they learned to travel space and time. The study of the Cascade lead to the creation of the Warp Station, pocket space that could turn vast distances into little more than the equivalent of a hallway walks.

Xi began to trade with other races, they were happy to pay to make an enemy their friend, and so the technology spread, the races taking Xi’s secrets and spreading them all across the cosmos, learning new civilizations and making friends and allies. Xi learned much from the Xi that had come before, and where these Xi had gone now, no one knew. Xi became a powerful, rich and mighty spacefaring civilization. A race of pioneers and explorers, of capitalists and traders, of merchants and armadas as they discovered more worlds and cultures to share with. They became the first interstellar race in the galaxy, a grand force of technological might and culture that made many enemies along their path, but their expansion and technology spread would make them supreme on their move.