Xapleaux - TheGiraffe3/Endless-Sky-Creators-Handbook GitHub Wiki

Original text, by MasterOfGrey

PHYSIOLOGY

HISTORY

• Reaching Space
• Calamity from Beyond
• Factional Identity
• Settling
• Growing Resent
• The Great Devastation
• The Great Under Crunch
• Paradise
• Understanding
• The Golden Age
• Opportunity
• Reward of Perseverance
• Friend Eager

DESIGN

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The Xapleaux are a large species with a body-form not dissimilar to that of a centipede, though they will appear rather more like a caterpillar due to the symbiotic fungus that grows on their carapace, and the 6 distinct limbs at the front that they can use to manipulate things.

Their physicality was initially inspired by these guys from Stellaris.

They come in multiple variants derived from different climates.

The Xapleaux have been around for a very long time, but after their first foray beyond the core ended in disaster they asked the Quarg (who they were on speaking terms with at the time) to close the way in. They have remained sealed inside the core ever since apart from one brief experiment with not-quite jump drives that ran into a few problems, not least of which was meeting the Hai (briefly) during their aggressive empire phase. They later abandoned all further research into that direction of development.

The Xapleaux are an old race but not so old in their present iteration. Their homeworld is a sizable moon of a small gas giant orbiting a shared center of gravity in a binary system way down in the bright part of the core. Consequently they've developed on a world that sees only a few hours of relative darkness a mere handful of times a year, and even when deeply cloudy that is perhaps twice as bright as the fullest moonlit night on Earth.

They first forayed into space some two-hundred thousand years ago, always cautious but optimistic. A friendly and communal lot, they were detritivores biologically adapted to clustering together in the shade with a mossy coating keeping the warmth of the suns off their backs. Born in the sun but always fearful of its unobstructed brilliance, they voyaged in short stints within their stellar neighborhood seeking new worlds and new friends. They were not inclined to places that were too dark, or to places that were too bright, and found themselves needing sizeable populations to develop on new worlds. Their ships were large, heavy, and built for one purpose, for they had never met any hostility from within or without. Their world possessed predators that would forage them out from the open spaces, but never when they were massed as a group, and so conflict between themselves was almost entirely limited to rare bouts of unexpected resource shortages from climate events. Their ships were homes, homes built to make new homes.

The first aliens they encountered were the Quarg, the Quarg who desired only to make friends, and in whom they found kindred spirits. The Quarg built small ships with only few individuals, but stood looming over the Xapleaux on solid ground. An adult Xapleaux is dwarfed by the most diminutive of Quarg children. The Xapleaux had never encountered language of the spoken kind, and it took the Quarg nearly a thousand years of steady effort to really nail down the process of communicating with their new diminutive friends using a hybrid sign and body language. It was then that they learned the true scope of the galaxy. Never yet had they traveled far enough to see beyond the brilliance of the core. They immediately set out to create ships which could go further, move faster, sustain themselves longer. The Quarg were forced to warn them that other species were evolved from predators, that they might need to exercise an amount of caution that they had not possessed in their earlier expansion.

They said they understood but they did not.

They ventured into the dark, and they met aliens who could not understand them and before long gave up trying. The Xapleaux were too strange and too capable of rapidly reproducing and it threatened them. The Xapleaux were driven out, taking what small few treasures they had found beyond the brilliance with them. The ways closed behind them.

The Quarg said that it was their friends who did it, and the Xapleaux were both grateful and resentful in equal parts. Theirs had only been the desire to make friends, and with no ways beyond the brilliance they could not do so again, but neither could those who'd driven them out pursue them. They asked of the Quarg to assist them in communicating with other friends of the Quarg, but the Quarg said those friends were too few and too far away, and they would not help. In frustration the Xapleaux closed their society to the Quarg, shutting them out in the same way they shut out their predators: huddling together and ignoring them until they went away.

Something had come back with them though, something nestled among the treasures they carried from beyond the brilliance.

Living inside a plant they had recovered, there existed a parasite. Living inside that parasite, there existed a virus. As a food crop the plant was spread far and wide, one of the great triumphs of their brief and disastrous exposure to the dark beyond. That parasite adapted to take another plant as a host, a plant that was occasionally subjected to a fungus. A fungus that possessed two life stages, one of which presented as a mildew on the moss that grew on the Xapleaux. A life cycle which the virus was able to replicate in.

The resulting life stage of the fungus grew down into the Xapleaux like the moss did and consumed them. The first instance was quarantined but it wasn't understood. Thousands died and when those who re-entered the space afterwards suffered the same fate the judicious use of fire was approved. Weeks later a breakout occurred on a different world entirely.

By the time they could even identify what was happening billions had died across all fifteen worlds the Xapleaux had spread to, billions more before they had grappled with the fact that it was too late, that it was already naturalized into their very environment by the sheer length of time that had been involved in the process. They couldn't even develop an effective way to fight it, as the genetic drift of the viral and fungal adaptions over so many worlds and environments meant that almost every breakout was different. Some killed quickly, some killed slowly, some killed horrifically. Some caused abnormal growth of the subjects before picking a method of death.

They built enclaves against worlds suddenly hostile to them in ways that they had never been before, and would scour new land before building new enclaves, and yet one by one those enclaves fell. Until one didn't.

On one world, one precious, beautiful world, an outbreak began... and the young survived.

No Xapleaux over the age of eight cycles was spared, but those few lived. Those few still in the nymph stage of their development, before they shed their divining tails and grew in their adult segments. Under the strictest of quarantines those children were rescued and brought to an enclave for careful care. They never touched another Xapleaux but they were able to interact through quarantine layers, and were cared for by robots. They became a second society, sharing everything except space with their enclave neighbors. And they grew up, and oh boy did they grow up.

No longer did the moss that grew upon them remain a fine, thick, mat. Now it threw long fronds into the air which drank in the sunlight and radiated the heat of biological processes away even under the brilliance of the full suns in the core. No longer did they seek the shade, but sought to be free in the full sun as much as possible. Eventually they took off the quarantine roofs of their own section of the enclave out of some teenage rebellious instinct and desire for the unfiltered sun, and they were fine. They were unaffected by the fungus that killed, having bonded symbiotically with a variant of it. They also grew. In the full sun and with the availability of enclave resources they grew and grew and grew, until an adult Xapleaux would not be so heavily pressed to walk beneath their legs with their head bowed.

Cautiously, a generation of young Xapleaux were introduced to the new Xapleaux and had the same positive outcomes, bar a few unfortunate cases. The new Xapleaux built beyond the walls of the enclave, and their way was eventually hailed as the way forward. They would piece their civilization back together with agonizing care to preserve the legacies and knowledge of the generations whose only choices were to live in a box, or to die. It would take a thousand years before the new Xapleaux would even be established on each of those worlds again. Thousands more before they had mastery of the same technologies at the scale they were now required to build them at.

Their evolution would take them from community minded detritivores, to omnivorous scavengers for which their old diet was only a portion of what made them strong and healthy. Generations of medical science would be re-written. Their whole conceptual underpinnings of language would evolve thrice over. They would always, always, fear the dark.

The next crisis to befall the Xapleaux would be one of language. They found that they were capable of emitting noises with their mouth parts that had not been possible before they ascended to their new forms. With no shortage of resources on any particular world, and with insufficient infrastructure and population to lend itself to the natural coherency of single government, this led to the development of regional dialects where the sign components of the language were the same, but the vocalized components shared very little connection. On Ink-learoumera-chanxer, their first ever colony world beyond their home, they even developed two distinct regional languages on the two major land masses. Fast forward a few hundred years and the envoys between worlds would communicate strictly in the ancestral sign, which would keep the peace, and yet the attempts to re-integrate into a united people would be undermined by the inability for those from one world to speak the full language of any others, and the fact that generational turnover had erased the ancestral sign from common use.

For the first time in their history disputes would arise from communication failures, rather than from strict debates over the use of resources. Violence would occur on the fringes of worlds' influences where they were attempting to salvage the ruins of their first civilization, and always there would be relief when the misunderstanding was resolved, and yet they would continue to happen. Something of their experience had settled within them a deep seated suspicion of the unknown and it came out when they were under pressure.

Each world built ships, ships with guns, relying on their natural caution to stand things off until a communication failure could be resolved rather than allowing ad hoc violence to erupt. Codes of behavior were formed and communicated by envoys to ensure that a consistent approach was taken, and a charter of rights and responsibilities to their fellow Xapleaux was drafted and circulated. For a time, it worked. Then something happened on Ink-learoumera-chanxer.

One of the main things that hamstrung their re-development was the capacity of their hyper drives. Their science had been developed for ships designed to carry beings an fraction of their size and so light as for five hundred of them to weigh as much as a single modern Xapleaux. The process of scaling up their drive technology had hamstrung them as the single most difficult thing, and changed them from using ships carrying thousands to ships carrying four. This had driven the critical role of the envoys, until someone developed a new drive on Ink-learoumera-chanxer.

They called it the string drive, and it was more than a mere hyper drive. Unfortunately when they tested it they tested it too close to the planet. Before they had barely needed to break atmosphere before they could hurl themselves from the system along the hyperspace lines, but the string drive required a larger standoff and they had not realized.

The wake of the first jump ignited the atmosphere and burned away most of the second continent. Those few who survived interpreted it first as an attack before they realized it was a disaster, but the call for help had gone out. This would be the first time the new Xapleaux would experience the collective madness of a community under attack, for they were still hugely community minded, and the idea that one of their communities would perpetrate such an act struck at the very core of them and fostered that suspicion of the unknown and different in a way they had not culturally reckoned with.

The fleets of the other worlds, comprising many thousands of tiny ships which complicated communications, descended upon their first colony to find the local fleet at war with itself, and promptly joined in. Factions descended on the world to control it, or to find out, and fights broke out between different fleets and forces that held the other under suspicion of being on the wrong side in the heat of a moment.

It was the first true bloodbath in their entire species' history.

Eventually the truth was uncovered and cooler heads prevailed. The technology of the string drive was not lost and was understood, and eventually would allow for the mass movement of people, and for their society would heal its wounds. The hundreds of millions who died in the disaster and the tens of millions who died in the ensuing conflict would leave a scar on their psyche though that would color their philosophy forever.

As time went on the Xapleaux reforged their society. The Quarg eventually attempted to contact them again, but they no longer spoke the same language, and the ancestral tongue had gone out of fashion. The Xapleaux found that they had a deep seated sense of suspicion and distrust of the Quarg though, and despite some handful of dedicated attempts they were unable to reopen a dialogue. Only a few months of effort would pass by with one Xapleaux before they found themselves unable to stomach dealing with the Quarg anymore and they would inevitably leave the project. Eventually, the Xapleaux gave up, and the Quarg didn't push it.

They also learned that the symbiotic fungus which had been responsible for their ascension was capable of a little thing called horizontal gene transfer. Every so often some minor advantageous mutation would occur, unnoticed within the sporing life cycle upon an adult, and four years later a wave of subtle change would swamp the upcoming generations to create new, ever so slightly different Xapleaux. It took many events to understand how this came about and identify a model for determining ground zero of these events, but they would eventually determine that a beneficial mutation would spread throughout the fungal coat of an adult and any adult they brushed against. Next time they spored it would spread to whoever was exposed, and then the next generation of young, more malleable in their symbiotic relationship, would grow to exhibit the changes that resulted.

The Xapleaux's own genome would not experience any significant change, but the virus like vector inside the fungus was capable of rapid change, and of drawing out latent genes buried by earlier phases of Xapleaux evolution. Each new wave would be accompanied by a spike in childhood mortality, in a species where childhood mortality was already much higher than other species might have accepted, as a result of this symbiotic relationship. They developed the practice of 'divining' names, and 'shedding' names awarded when they reached relative maturity and shed their divining tails.

Every new generation of change would drive innovation and progress in the absence of conflict as the usual driver of a civilization's development, and would often involve increased conscious control of the interaction between the Xapleaux and their symbiotic partner.

It is debatable which of the changes had the greatest effect, but the first of the great changes was the Layering. The Layering was a sudden generational shift which involved a separation between two components of a Xapleaux's brain within the language center. It allowed for a Xapleaux to process language communication aimed at it at the same time as it communicated its own thoughts. Essentially the ability to speak and to listen at the same time.

From one generation to the next the younger Xapleaux were simply superior communicators: able to express subtleties through a combination of vocalizations, signs, body language, and manipulation of their fungal fronds, all while absorbing that same complexity of speech from whomever they were 'listening' to without difficulty.

The older Xapleaux had never chosen to express concepts using more than two of those components simultaneously, and a resentfulness of a generation whom they quite literally could not understand generated a huge divide. By this time the average Xapleaux life expectancy was nearly two hundred cycles, and a generation who had missed out on this new stage, in some cases by mere weeks, were forced to grapple with the prospect of being obsolete within their own society during the prime of their lives. Made redundant by newer, faster, and more capable youngsters before they'd even truly begun their lives and careers.

By the time fifty cycles had passed fully three quarters of the population had been relegated to menial jobs or to a lifestyle typically associated with senescence, in some cases a century before their time. In a desperate bid to prevent their society dividing itself, something which would have been seen as a deep failure of their species by all Xapleaux, they began the "Friendfinder" project.

The Xapleaux had always had a particular strength in their scanner technology. Their sensors were incredibly discerning, for this was necessary in order to reliably determine anything in an area of space so awash in the levels of solar radiation that was standard for the core. So they had some very good scans of Quarg ships.

The Friendfinder project was open only to 'unlayered' Xapleaux, and it had one stated mission: to build a drive and a ship that could take them beyond the brilliance without the hyperways they relied upon. This project was given essentially unlimited resources, while the layered Xapleaux got on with running and adapting their society through the evolving change it was experiencing.

It took nearly sixty cycles, and in the end the project employed some fifty billion unlayered Xapleaux across all fifteen worlds at some point in the supply chain. The result was what one might call a 'brute force' solution. They developed a drive that could jump as the Quarg did, at the cost of two small moons and a space station.

It was not elegant, it was not compact, it was not efficient, but it did work. The drive itself was larger than the entire hull of the Quarg's smaller ships, and it consumed so much fuel that you could travel from one end of the brilliance to the other using as much with a string drive. It would later be determined that it also had a one in ten thousand chance of destabilizing and detonating upon making a jump. But the project was a success.
^{(this was partly the result of Pug fuckery but they don't know that.)}

Massive ships, each crewed by a couple thousand unlayered Xapleaux were built to accommodate these drives, and they were sent out to find friends, and to find where else there may be brilliance in the galaxy.

And so began the Great Devastation of the Xapleaux.

In one direction they found the ruins of those they first met so many millennia ago, who had driven them out and whose food crop had been the seed of their ascension. Nothing but empty worlds and desolate spaces.

In the next they found an area of the galaxy rent by a cataclysm beyond their imagining. Where space itself was hostile to them and where they frequently found themselves at dead ends, with nowhere their drive could take them. Ominous space anomalies that linked to other places but would not let them pass.

In the next they found a new people, a young people, and a violent people. Those people attacked them to try and gain their technology, and their massive friend-ships were lost to destruction or retreated from the face of such avarice.

In the next they found only emptiness.

The impact on their culture was devastating. To be near as it mattered to being alone in a galaxy that neither understood nor was understood by them. It was bad when some of the ships didn't come back, it was worse when some of them did, but a darker reality yet remained. For some that came back latest of all, came back different.

Despite their efforts the artificial brilliance in their ships was not sufficient, or maybe it was more psychological than that. In any case those that traveled the longest came back afflicted by terrors in their mind, things they could not grapple with, that haunted the edges of their vision. Often they would take their own lives, less often they would seek out those others who had traveled beyond and try and bring them down as well.

The final straw came when the last ship, the Ixn-mearulifearoiloum-dinggrend-hearuoilimour, returned to the brilliance on autopilot. The logs on board showed that they had found a brilliance in the beyond, a trinary system with two close neighbors that were both binaries containing a supergiant. It was dim by the standards of their core worlds, but only slightly dimmer than that of Faerilloumier-iking-kicklissnika-puol on the end of their space.

The cost of that discovery was beyond words though. Every last Xapleaux on board had eventually succumbed to a violent madness, and all three thousand four hundred and eighty six Xapleaux had killed each other or themselves on the return journey. Their ship had become their tomb. Their friend-ships were scrapped, their drives decommissioned, the Xapleaux would wait.

One day, they hoped, friends would come to them.

For a great length of time after the failure of the Friendfinder the Xapleaux experienced a great cultural depression at the devastating obliteration of their hopes and dreams. Many had died in the development and operation of the project, and the unlayered Xapleaux were almost gone as a result of generational turnover by the time it reached its final conclusion.

Those of the post-layering Xapleaux, in many ways more capable than their forebears, took up the project with the hope of refining the jump technology. This was an activity the Quarg would occasionally fly by to monitor, though no actual exchanges would take place between their peoples. This renewed side-effort was performed as a consolation in the hope that if friends ever came to them they could be met on equal grounds. Eventually though it would come to be known as The Great Under Crunch (translated), named for a particularly large beetle on one of their worlds that hunted by lurking beneath the surface of soft ground and disemboweling Xapleaux who walked over it unaware.

For the only conclusion that the layered Xapleaux were able to eventually draw was that they had never been on the right path at all. Like children performing complex maths in simple problems, that had inadvertently arrived at the correct answer, by the wrong method. (This is probably down to Pug magic teaching them something but they don't know that.)

The fact that their answer worked at all was nothing short of a miracle, but the conclusive determination that they could take their answer no further was a crushing blow. They as a society could not call themselves equal to friends who would understand this technology if it cost them thousands of lives at random just to travel beyond the brilliance. This was not acceptable. The research was buried, lest it be misused, with just enough in the public record to warn people of the failures that avenue led to.

Nevertheless there was an advantage yet to be derived from the project that came to pass. The Xapleaux would have a love affair with the concept of paradise. In the ruins of their past enemies they had drawn many records and cultural artifacts out that had been brought home for study, and the written language was slowly deciphered. There they discovered the concept of paradise and the idea became as contagious as any development in their symbiotic fungus.

For the Xapleaux were detritivores and scavengers by nature, even when they had built up their civilization and cultivated their lands their efforts had been more focused on preventing wildlife from eating things they would enjoy once they became overripe. The concept of an ecosystem that worked for them from the bottom up was a fundamentally alien concept. The mark of their civilization had been to largely remove themselves from the food chain, not to place themselves atop it, and the idea was revolutionary.

The Xapleax were, after all, very sensitive to the health of their ecosystems given their role in them, and their understanding of the interplay between different elements was one of their strongest fields of science. So as they arose from the great cultural devastation they embarked on a species-wide quest for perfect worlds.

They were not so foolish as to eradicate environments from a world totally, but they engaged in a process of eco-terraforming. They pushed those undesirable environments into small enclaves on the fringes of their living spaces while they crafted their desirable biome across the wide temperate zones of their worlds either by nurturing or importing one species or another, and for a time it seemed as if they would succeed.

Indeed, one of those environments persists even to this day on Ixik-swuirelouminore-kickek-moule, but the others have now all gone.

A ground fern, a bacterium, and an arthropod they themselves were distantly related to were the cause of their great problem. From two different ecologies came a tree-climbing beetle that ate epiphytes where they were in abundance, and a fern that proliferated enthusiastically and provided safe habitat for myriad tiny species in addition to being pleasantly soft underfoot. The beetle digested the plant matter it fed upon with the aid of a bacterium in its gut, and through its droppings this bacterium entered the environment on their homeworld of Xaplo.

The bacterium was harmless on its own, but it proved to be unexpectedly compatible with the digestive tract of their distantly related species. It also entered play very late in the process, and so the environment was well-advanced by the time the problem began to stir. On the fringe of a small biome, squeezed into a corner out of their way, this small detritivore relative consumed the foreign bacterium and passed it on. Suddenly, an obligate detritivore was capable of digesting plant matter, plant matter in abundance within an environment almost devoid of their natural predators and with an under-layer almost specifically tailored to suit them.

Within a month there were more living outside their home biome than in it by supplementing their diets on tiny amounts of healthy plant-life. Within a year they had spread to over seventy percent of the cultured paradise. At slightly more than one cycle the detritus-producing capacity of their new ecology had been balanced with the consumption capacity of the population, outcompeting less uninhibited detritivores.

Just two days after that an ecologist noticed them consuming a wilted ground fern that had been healthy only the previous day. The ecological engine of the Xapleaux paradise team was quick to act, for this was the sort of problem they had had to address many times in the process of developing this cultured biome, but they were not prepared for the scale of this.

They had identified a possible introduced species solution within three days, they had collected several thousand of that species and got them en route within a week, they had arrived within thirteen days.

Unfortunately, the entire ground fern layer had been eradicated within seven days. The nymphs of a new generation were maturing at almost unprecedented rates on the mass decaying carcasses of two dozen species driven extinct by their sudden lack of food and exposure from their protective covering within nine days. By twelve days nothing that stood shorter than an adult Xapleaux still bore leaves.

The species to be introduced arrived but by then it was too late. A global resource crash was already underway, oxygen levels across the planet had plummeted six whole percent. Xapleaux were having to rest inside sealed rooms to avoid waking up to their symbiotic fungus having been eaten away in their sleep, a condition that was fatal within a dozen hours and totally unable to be cured.

On day fifteen general evacuation of the entire planet was announced. In a heroic effort that would live in their cultural memory forever, twenty-one percent of all Xapleaux were successfully evacuated. Some two billion individuals. Twenty-one percent by day twenty-one.

By day twenty-two there were no significant, complex, non-plant, land organisms alive on the planet, and through the entire stretch of their cultured paradise biome the soil acidity was killing what little was left.

Thirteen worlds immediately abandoned their paradise projects.

On Ixik-swuirelouminore-kickek-moule, which had already declared their project to be finished, the most stringent biosecurity protocols ever designed were introduced. Fortunately, the oceans would come to the rescue. Endless stretches of sea plant-life restored the oxygen balance and the reintroduction of original homeworld species that they had carried to their colonies rebuilt the biosphere. Within three short years they could return to their home, but it would carve a memory into them so deeply it would never be forgotten.

The next great change to the Xapleaux would occur within just a couple of generations of the previous one, making this century the single most significant period of upheaval in their society. It began as each new wave of change always did, accompanied by a spike in childhood mortality, and yet there were no apparent significant changes.

The new generation seemed to pick up speech quickly and excel at their studies, yet testing of their inherent problem solving abilities showed no deviation from prior generations.

In the wake of their most recent disasters the Xapleaux had embarked on a program of comprehensively educating their offspring rather than allowing them to pursue their own interests once they had the basics, and this actually served to mask the effects of the new change and skew the data. It was not until the third new generation progressed into their upper schooling that it became apparent to researchers what exactly was occurring.

The strong, lingering, innate response generated within all Xapleaux by being in the presence of Quarg had long garnered suspicion that something of this sort might lay dormant in their genealogy, but it was only to be confirmed with this change. The Xapleaux had a genetic memory, and it was awakening. They did not simply remember everything their forebears had known, though that certainly seemed to have an impact on how quickly they could follow that path of learning. There were rules that determined what was recalled.

The first and most significant rule was that they did not recall events from previous generations, but merely knowledge in the sense of a fact remembered without the context of when it was learned. It was fortunate in this case that they were not a society prone to such things as disinformation campaigns, for the impact of such a thing lingering in the collective consciousness would have had devastating inter-generational impacts.

The second rule was that, to fully recall information from previous generations it had to be both known and understood by both parents. A difference in understanding or knowledge without understanding would result in nothing more complex than a hunch or a suspicion of something, though it would also lend itself to an affinity for developing that understanding easily.

The third rule was that the emotion associated with learning that knowledge did not come down unless it had been rationalized internally into an understood phenomena. This had the blessing that the horror of recent catastrophes was not viscerally recalled, for there was no need to rationalize the feelings of losing a home world. That understanding was innate. However, this also had the outcome that suddenly almost every single Xapleaux of the new generation knew and felt three things.

• The Quarg would not help them go where the Quarg had been and so were untrustworthy as friends.
• Their behavior towards the Quarg had been shameful and immature, and so they bore their own responsibility for receiving no other aid from the Quarg.
• The Quarg would not build bridges when they knew others could not, and would let them die instead of allowing second chances.

The events had occurred and been understood by all when there were so few of them, and reinforced by so many minor events and cycles of discussion that they had been felt and understood deeply and widely. The resurgence of the conscious understanding was so widespread that it was impossible to not be exposed to it, and within a generation those few who had not understood and recalled were passing this to their offspring.

Any chance of relations with the Quarg re-arising spontaneously died. On the flip side, this capacity to more easily transmit information down through the generations begun the great golden age of the Xapleaux. An age of reformation, restructure, and widespread, deeply detailed improvements to the systems underpinning their societies. Philosophy, civics, law, economics, logistics, healthcare, anything that relied on incremental observation and adjustment (or root analysis problem solving) rather than brilliant insight was improved out of sight compared to what it was before.

These Awakened Xapleaux in this age of understanding would also be acutely aware of how vulnerable their worlds were to ecological crashes as happened on Xaplo. Nowhere else was quite as fragile as their home had been during the paradise project, but all their worlds were primarily populated by species from their home, comparatively little complex life had developed on the worlds they had colonized and terraformed. A repeat event would not likely be anywhere as dramatic as the crisis on Xaplo, but they understood that if it happened again they would feel it forever, because the loss would have been avoidable and the mechanisms a result of understood negligence.

This golden age would produce as its crowning achievement the Resilience Project.

A deliberate and conscious effort to increase biodiversity, and biome diversity, across all their worlds, and to build in more artificial methods of farming what they needed for their people without relying so heavily on the natural environment. Since most of their worlds had been built around the development of the most beneficially productive biome for them to inhabit, the artificial resilience of their civilization to resource shocks was an important component of increasing their worlds' biological resilience as they would be actively fostering biomes that were less productive for their purposes in order to control the risk of an incident.

They had witnessed biomes during the Friendfinder project that existed on none of their worlds, and they even made the effort to reproduce analogues of these where possible. All of this led to increased knowledge bases in materials science, engineering techniques, artificial environments and energy management. The effect on their space-based infrastructure and shipbuilding was pronounced, and the design philosophies adopted during this era are carried through unto the present day.

As the Resilience Project began to reach its conclusion, which took many thousands of years as precision terraforming is a detailed process even if the major works were completed in the first dozen or so centuries, the infant mortality rate began to rise as wave after wave of minor generational variations swept through the population. Of course none of this was abnormal at first, occasional spikes in those stats was natural and happened nearly twice in every century. What was abnormal is that what was initially seen as an unfortunate double wave instead continued to rise and rise, filling the spaces in society like a tsunami that rippled ashore and touched everything in its path. The default rate of just under six percent rose and rose and rose until it peaked at just over thirty percent.

This series of generational tweaks was attributed to their more comprehensive exposure to less common, and in some cases designer, organisms as their civilization spread whole societies into places they would never have chosen to live in before, with the aid of their newer philosophy and associated technology. Naturally, as the last stages of the project were closed out they expected it to end, to represent a mere dark patch in the course of their history. Poor timing and circumstance producing a case of collective bad luck.

They were wrong.

The new rate held for five generations without ever wavering, and no solution was forthcoming. As a society they gradually came to acknowledge that the problem would not go away on its own. Something about their new resilient worlds was causing waves of adaptation and counter-adaptation in their symbiotic fungus and it wasn't settling down on its own. Efforts to find a solution grew in scope and significance to little avail. On the one hand this crisis did not exactly threaten their civilization, but it had the insidious property of touching every individual personally.

In an unrelated capacity, near one end of the brilliance, there existed a rogue world. Quite heavy, very cold, rich in heavy metals and water, and with a sizeable moon even richer again in the rarer metals and crystal compounds formed back before it had frozen solid. For reasons that they couldn't even guess at, the hyperlanes connected to this rogue world instead of any of the stars in the vicinity and Ixikke-faoule-ntic, the moon, was a valuable stopover, for the only alternative routes were to traverse the full circumference of the brilliance to get around to the next system, or to pass before the great eye of the cosmos which gazed darkly into their home.

Of course passing near the black hole didn't actually pose any threat to them, but it represented the closest thing to superstition that existed within their culture and so captains were understandably uncomfortable traveling through the system for mundane reasons.

The world, Ixikke-foule-jurtwuillemoure-kicheck, had ever been too cold to support life in the history of their civilization. During the ninth generation of the risen wave though, a passing ship observed something strange. Across a large swathe of the planet a mighty discoloration had suddenly occurred. By the time a researcher was able to be brought in it had nearly gone again, and a storm was whirling across the surface scouring all trace of it away at a rapid rate of knots. Some hastily retrieved dead samples indicated it had been an organism with some combination of plant and fungal traits.

It immediately garnered significant interest.

A period of intense study followed, focused around this world that had been flown by, largely ignored, for over a hundred thousand years at this stage. The first major thing discovered was that the world was warming. An average temperature of minus fifteen degrees centigrade had been surreptitiously creeping upwards over the previous few millienia. Such a temperature had only really been possible because of its unique position within the brilliance, being comparatively far from any of its nearest stars, as the sheer proximity of one star to the next was such that very few places were indeed actually cold.

It turned out that the four nearest stars had been gradually falling into position as a loose quaternary system spanning a huge distance. Given the entirety of the Xapleaux home system could fit inside the largest of these stars, the scale could not be understated. Ixikke-foule-jurtwuillemoure-kicheck had been fortunate enough to have drifted into a roughly elliptical orbit of the common center of gravity. Its path wandered around a little, but it had already completed a few full circuits of this orbit and was embarking on its next at the time this discovery was made. The variability of solar radiation exposure over its orbit was small, but enough to generate a mild seasonal variance, and each warming period had shifted its average temperature by an incremental amount as ice shifted down slope and revealed less reflective bare rock.

The second major thing discovered was that this world had actually borne a thriving ecology at one point in its history, but it had frozen down to almost nothing when it was flung away from its parent star sometime in the distant past. The hardiest of those organisms, many of them living inside rock, in frozen water pockets under the ice or indeed in rare cases even within the ice, were gradually recolonizing the nearly barren surface as conditions crept towards being more favorable.

Sensing opportunity, the Xapleaux terraforming authorities authorized the use of biodegradable chaff on the world to reduce its reflectivity, and within a year it was rapidly approaching an average above zero.

The third major thing that was discovered was that the life on this world had become ecologically simple as conditions grew worse, but biologically complex. In heated spring pools under the ice, archea had stewed in fluids filled with the detritus of multiple ecosystems. Here a bacterium capable of horizontal gene transfer, there a fungus with spores capable of withstanding high temperatures, a seed coating that separates in the cold, a protozoa that feeds on sulfur, an aquatic creature which filters microorganisms from the water. All these influences had gone through cycles of constrained evolution in highly limited environments.

What had resulted from this primordial stew were organisms that fulfilled multiple roles in an environment. Features stolen from any number of original organisms and blended into what they eventually became. An entire ecosystem with two dozen major roles might contain only five or six actual unique organisms, but with different genes expressed to trigger their development of specific traits for the environment they developed in. Each organism had evolved to store up reproductive energy and to lay out a new generation if conditions changed on them suddenly. The entire population of an organism might be wiped out in a sudden change, but the next generation would be seeded, ready to express whatever latent adaptations it needed to thrive in the new environment.

It became apparent to researchers very quickly that studying the redevelopment of the ecosystem as the world defrosted would make avoiding exposure themselves impossible in relatively short order. So the decision was made to establish research bases as the world warmed up and began to renew its biosphere, and to use volunteer researchers for the purpose of controlled exposure trials.

It didn't take a genius to see that the answer to their problem lay in the life of this world, what remained to be seen was the cost.

With optimistic trepidation the Xapleaux began colonization-by-research-base of this new world. It did not take long to have a reasonable grasp of the hazards involved. As the ecosystem emerged from under the ice it spread rapidly from the enclaves it had hidden away in. From one day to the next bare soil would find itself with a dusting of fuzzy green growth from spores blown in overnight, spreading across dozens of kilometers in a day, only to be overrun by something more successful, or more predatory, spreading from a different enclave somewhere else.

The researchers experienced such traumatic events as total infant mortality, spontaneous adult deaths and unexpected sterility. With grim determination though they bore the suffering, documenting their findings, and any organisms they could isolate. Even when they had only hours for something to be retrieved before it was overrun by something else.

The first promising variation had the unfortunate consequence of driving the affected individuals into a vegetative state within a year of adulthood, but fortunately whatever process underpinned their symbiote's selective processes resisted that from naturalizing more widely. Young researchers successfully raised on Ixikke-foule-jurtwuillemoure-kicheck were valued above all, as there was a propensity for sudden changes to cause minor afflictions to those who came from abroad.

Their nerve almost broke when one colony base produced a generation with only four percent infant mortality and was celebrating the adulthood of that generation before their symbiotes killed every last one of them, juvenile and adult, with a sporing variant that mutated at the same life stage.

For forty-three standard cycles the researcher colonists weathered an average infant mortality rate of nearly seventy percent while the rest of their civilization looked on in horror, clinging to the slender hope of successful adaptation.

The world's ecology grew more and more stable over time as organisms found their niches and food chains developed. As ice receded to the thin coatings on the polar layers, and mega storms were driven across the land by the processes of ocean currents coming into being and the blossoming maturity of the water cycle, organisms were displaced to homes they had never existed in, thousands of kilometers from where they had weathered the harshest conditions. The more things settled though, the more the fear that a solution would not arrive grew in step with the maturity of the planet.

When the Xapleaux reached the point of introducing some external species to help keep favorable biomes intact the collective thread of hope that a solution would emerge could be felt fraying away under the mounting attention given to the lack of results.

For the first time in their history, their culture grappled with the concept of collective faith. "Have faith," they were told. "Hold onto hope," they were implored. The path forward was unclear if they failed, and confidence in their government reached historic lows as many retreated to self-governing as smaller communities, limiting their exposure to the wider society and thus the unending march of bad news.

But quietly, with great determination and great desperation, they clung onto that hope.

And they were rewarded.

After twelve generations the Xapleaux lifted their heads one morning to the news of The Great Project, for it had come to be known as such, to hear the first note of cautious optimism broadcast into their feeds.

After twelve generation the Xapleaux whose population had declined roughly twenty-eight percent, laid their eyes upon the first new generation who had all shed their divining tails safely and successfully with only eight percent mortality.

After twelve generations the Xapleaux dared to breath aloud the hope they had held quietly inside for so many years.

This new generation were odd, they stood a whole fifth shorter than their forebears. The scaly segments of their carapaces were broader and overlapped in interesting ways. Their symbiotic fungus grew shorter and more thickly, strange frilly fronds with layered elements instead of the long, graceful ones that were standard. Their eyes were set deeply and their legs were set closer in, as if to be shielded from the world by tough flaps from their covering.

They were strange, almost alien to the Xapleaux that looked on but when they communicated they were Xapleaux nevertheless, and they were healthy. They were split up and some taken to three other colony bases (out of seventeen).

The next generation grew up successfully where they were present. Each colony had its own spin on exactly what they came out looking like, but they were all successful. All of the bases joined in the next wave, and the next generation grew up successfully across every single colony. In total eleven major variants came up, with only subtle differences between colonies with same category outcomes.

With bated breath they made the decision to open up unrestricted travel to and from Ixikke-foule-jurtwuillemoure-kicheck.

As a society they braced for the worst. Fifteen worlds so far kept in isolation from the developments on this research world, but collectively they had borne almost as much as they could bear. If disaster was to come they had resolved by popular vote to face it head on. The path forward needed to be clear, and many felt they couldn't bear to return to the uncertainty of a new round of waiting. They were resolved to get it over and done with.

After fourteen generations what came next was nothing short of a miracle. Eleven variants held true, with a few sub-variants. The mortality rate dropped from twenty-nine point eight percent to seven point nine in one single generation.

The Xapleaux Diaspora had begun.

The Post-Diaspora Xapleaux gradually settled into a well-understood array of categories, and acquired shorthand names for each variant. A human might wonder whether there was any risk of something akin to racial discrimination arising from sudden diversity in appearance and physical capacity, but the differences were never significant enough to unmanageably disadvantage one variety from living and working in another place, and there was zero potential for inter-generational consequences when all Xapleaux would adopt the typing of the location they were raised in regardless of parentage.

The (translated) nicknames for each variant and sub-variant became:

1. Steppe
   • Plateau (drier and cooler)
   • Plains (warmer, not dryer)
   • Veld (warmer and dryer)
2. Savanna
3. Mire (shared features)
   • Bog
   • Fen
   • Marsh
4. Scrub (closest to the original Xapleaux)
   • Chaparral (coastal + Anthos cross)
5. Taiga
   • Cyanoids (sleet resistant + Anthos cross)
6. Swamp
7. Jungle
   • Montane (fog as precipitation)
8. Forest
   • Fern (wetter but still warm)
   • Moist (very wet but also cold)
9. Broadleaf (deciduous)
10. Anthos (extreme environments without woody plants)
    • Herby (dies off in harsh seasonal cold)
    • Seedy (dies off in harsh seasonal heat)
    • Tuber (dies off in seasonal fire)
11. Ephemeral (highly artificial environments)

Only environments which actually produced reasonable detritus were responsible for adaptive categories. Where there existed deserts and other inhospitable environs lacking decaying matter, it was simply not conducive to raising Xapleaux to maturity. The increased exposure to diverse environments, and the combination of variously adapted Xapleaux in diverse social groups within these environs, led to a resurgence in new culture and arts. A renaissance of society that endured for a truly staggering length of time.

Things were good, and problems of economics had largely been solved. Progressive, incremental improvement on their sciences and technologies made up most of what was celebrated, and indeed there evolved a niche genre of drama which revolved around different research teams debating whether to try and combine discoveries or separate them into new branches and the politics involved in the decisions. Interestingly there was also a niche of Scrub Xapleaux recreating pre-diaspora classics.

The Xapleaux life expectancy now stretched to some two hundred and eighty cycles, but it seemed that that was as far as it was likely to go. Though, in a fascinating turn of events, a Montane Xapleaux could functionally live forever if they could avoid falling asleep. At a certain advanced age they could curl up in an appropriate spot in the forest and, with sufficient stillness and sufficient body mass, allow their symbiotic fungus to spread into the soil. After such a time they could meditate, but never sleep for they would never awaken again.

The Quarg had long since stopped coming by their systems. At one point, for some reason, an increase in Quarg traffic had been met with a Xapleaux fleet locking their weapons on Quarg ships until they stopped coming through entirely. Not that a single Xapleaux ship was a match for a Quarg vessel but the Xapleaux built their ships big, so one didn't have to press the numerical advantage overly much to be intimidating.

Consequently the Xapleaux diaspora lived and thrived in nearly perfect isolation. So content were they within the brilliance, and so diverse were they within themselves, that they almost forgot the cultural desire for new friends.

Everything changed though when a previously unseen ship materialized in their space in the manner of the Quarg. Perhaps they were too enthusiastic, or too eager, but the ship was immediately identified by sensors and scanned. A collection of hails were directed towards it. In hindsight they realized it was probably overwhelming. The ship immediately jumped back out.

The next time ships arrived they were bigger, and they weren't just one ship. Seven large ships arrived in a different system, and this time the Xapleaux held back. A single ship was designated to scan and hail the incoming ships.

The new arrivals scanned the Xapleaux ships back and responded in some harsh verbal gibberish that meant nothing to the Xapleaux. Then they disappeared. Scans revealed that these were battleships, and as a precaution the Xapleaux elected to ensure a dozen or so of their security vessels were in all the nearby systems just in case. Over the next few weeks a dozen or so occurrences of ships jumping in along one side of their space followed the same pattern: arrive, scan, fail to communicate, leave.

What followed was months of no appearances. The Xapleaux wondered if these strange new aliens would return, but they were cautious. They maintained security fleets in place, for it had been abundantly clear that the ships appearing were warships. Their caution proved wise when nearly a cycle later a flotilla of these vessels jumped in and opened fire on the Xapleaux defenders. The Xapleaux were outnumbered, and outgunned, though the overall masses of the fleets were approximately equivalent owing to the Xapleaux preference for bigger, heavier vessels that they could feel less isolated on. Some of the smaller support craft in the strange attack fleet were quickly disabled, but it seemed that perhaps they were going to come out very poorly in this engagement.

Then, without warning, the strange attackers stopped.

First one, then another, simply shut down and began to drift. When fully half had failed, almost for no apparent reason, the rest began to stop and jump away. Not all of them were successful. Within a short space of time they had been properly disabled, and suddenly the Xapleaux were faced with a question they'd never had to answer before: What to do with enemy combatants at your mercy?

After some deliberation, transports were called in with security forces to board and capture. The enemy did not surrender. The Xapleaux found their equipment, and to a degree their selves, to be remarkably resilient to these invader's weapons. In the firefight they captured three of the biggest vessels that had attacked, with comparatively few losses, but when they went for the fourth ship it self-destructed, taking the transport with it.

They attempted boarding a smaller ship with one of their more resilient security vessels and it too blew up, though without the disastrous results of the transport. After that they decided they didn't have the stomach for such things and they simply stripped what they could and destroyed the remaining disabled ships. They needed to understand these attackers, and what had happened in the battle.

No more attacks came and eventually they were able to decipher the written language of the invaders from ship systems, or at least the basics of it. In this way they determined that these invaders were called the "Korath" in written form, though they could not equate that to anything pronounceable, and they determined something which surprised them somewhat. The enemy had overheated.

The invader's vessels ran hot with their guns, and with their engines, and with their idle systems. Coupled with the warmer ambient space of the brilliance and the heat generated by the Xapleaux weaponry (though that was more by accident than design), their ships had simply overstressed their cooling systems and shut down.

With the basics understood the Xapleaux spent many cycles subsequently analyzing the equipment captured from the Korath and looking for synergies with their existing sciences. The plasma core was something that they found interesting, though highly undesirable in their environment compared to their own generation methods. The engines on the other hand, had some interesting enhancement opportunities.

The three jump drives on board the ships they had captured, and five they had successfully stripped from the rest of the disabled ships that hadn't self-destructed, were scanned closely, but they had already seen what messing with jump technology could do to the space around it if the energy was released in an uncontrolled way, and so they instead kept them for use in the future.

After fifteen cycles of no reappearances, the Xapleaux decided they would at least try to make contact with these strangers called the "Korath". They could transmit a text-message, and hope that it was understood. Eight of their best ships were equipped with the best new engines and armed up with the strongest of everything they had. They were assigned specially chosen crews of exclusively Taiga, Cyanoid and Ephemeral Xapleaux who had the greatest tolerance for lower light levels. They were the Dark Fleet and they were prepared.

Eight ships left the brilliance to the nearest system they could identify in the direction of the Korath. They arrived into a war-zone. They still sent their message, because of course they did. Even as they were fired upon they sent their message. Then they jumped to a different system and sent their message again. Then they jumped home. The bulk and resilience of their vessels was sufficient that they could not be prevented from leaving by these "Korath", even when the fight would have been readily lost had they stayed.

A few days later a "Korath" ship jumped into the brilliance and transmitted a single message before leaving. It simply read, "Stay out."

The "Korath" were at war with themselves, and they were not willing to entreat with the Xapleaux on even the most basic of terms. So the Xapleaux resolved to wait.

Many more cycles passed and then "Korath" scouts again began appearing, conducting quick scans and leaving, but only in one small area of the brilliance. The Xapleaux increased security in that region and waited to see what would happen. Then the raids began.

Using big ships that seemed specially equipped to run cooler, and using weapons that made it very hard for the Xapleaux to approach close enough to bring their weapons to bear, the "Korath" began arriving en mass in huge raids. Defeating security forces, stripping away parts that they could access, and then jumping away as reinforcements arrived. Whatever they were taking seemed important enough to leave their disabled ships behind when they escaped.

These weapons they eventually found out were called "Banishers" and "Detainers" and the Xapleaux went to work trying to understand them as the raiding vessels gradually seemed to be built tougher and tougher. It seemed that these "Korath" were trying to learn more about what made the Xapleaux ships so resilient, and so to the Xapleaux it appeared that there happened an exchange of materials science and engineering for energy science and weapons. The raids became less and less frequent, and eventually stopped altogether.

When the Xapleaux's Dark Fleet went out again they found only hostile automatons and desolation. They mourned the loss of a species they had hoped they might understand one day, and they retreated again into their self-imposed isolation within the brilliance.

Maybe next time would be better.

As a very old race that has foregone the search for anything like a jump drive, their specialty is in having actually come up with a highly refined hyperdrive, called a String drive. It is the pinnacle of their main technological avenue, and has been refined continuously since its development quite a long while back. All their other unique systems are all about heat management, safer power generation, resilience in a hostile environment, or more recently borrowing concepts from the Korath who attempted to raid them briefly during the civil war.

Their ship classes are named for categories of beetles and other arthropods. Their drive names are named for the categories of insect wings.

Their world, system, and individual ship names are long, but they serve a purpose. Their names are descriptive and contain both a spoken and a hand-sign/body language element. The sections with hard guttural sounds are the vocal parts, and the rounded soft sounds are textual representations of gestures. Their current language is difficult enough that even the Quarg don't have the capacity to talk to them, though that's partly because the Xapleaux face their own barriers when it comes to trying to deal with Quarg.