I stared down at my writing assignment in the low light apartment. My eyes glazing over the pages of the history tablet sat beside it... Then I began internally reading my paper so far.
“Atalor is a planet thick with vegetation. Always had been, always would be. Even here in the city a particularly resistant brush, a patch of ferns, or a tentacle-like root could sprout up between dense concrete sheets in nights. Much like the Cyonians, the planet was untamed. We liked it that way.
Then the Coalition came. They spoke of machinations greater than our simple world before we’d even had time to reel on the realization the galaxy had other intelligent life beyond our own comparatively primitive planet. A multi-species Coalition coming from a silver sky-ship down to a barely industrial society: That was the sight Cyonians were met with.
A great, calamitous galactic horror would gobble us up if we did not yield to the space-borne visitor’s will. So they said. A gargantuan empire ruled by bloodthirsty predators willing to do anything to get a meal was out there right now. Fighting to take the known and unknown, like us. We’d be made to be conquered on our own planet. Our people kept alive only to toil as slaves or sequestered off as food for these would-be subjugators and hunters. The Bala’ur, they were called.
The Coalition insisted that we allow them to do a ‘sweep’ of our world to cull the naturally occurring predator population. Claiming such a high concentration of their foul energies would attract this yet unseen Bala’ur threat. In these times we were a superstitious people, and were easily cowed into accepting this seeming truth.
When the first of the Coalition’s workers had landed on our soil and tried to burn away our jungles and tropical forests it’d been wasted effort. All they’d accomplished was creating ashen fields that would regrow in a generation or two, and drove the native predators further into the mainland. Making them harder to remove for our pest control agencies that’d endured from the pre-Coalition age of breech-loaded firearms. We’d always referred to them as rangers.
Protests had broken out, rioting even. Burning away the natural beauty of our planet was unacceptable. No amount of dogma from aliens could possibly persuade us. We’d not known they would simply burn our world. They’d insisted still we must destroy all predators on our planet, wherever they may pop up.
In the end our own representatives had struck accords with the supposed friends they claimed to be. The Coalition would maintain a guild on our planet to ensure a low predator population. However, they’d only be permitted to operate in city limits. Our locally maintained rangers would take care of the Wildlands, the less developed settlements, and disparate outposts that dotted the super-continent we called home. None of them would be permitted outside the cities for official duty.
Shortly after. Our induction into the Coalition as a member nation was ratified. The transition government dissolved, and The Cyonian Assembly was born.”
My eyes traced over the words again. Had I blanked out? My paw numbly let the stylus fall from my thumb grasper. Staring down at the writing tablet. My ringtail patterned appendage behind me flicked this way. Its black and grey fades swirling like the anxiety in my gut.
How well could an paper like this really go toward my degree in Journalism? I mean: It was just a mock up article to be put on the net right? Something to remind our society of how we got here, stuck in this seemingly eternal war with the... The Bala’ur.
Would it be interpreted poorly to talk about one of the most contentious treaties between the Coalition and the Cyonian people? Even to this night it was clear from talking heads from the Coalition that the only reason the treaty had held the test of time was because they couldn’t be bothered to renegotiate it. Our wild predator population index was highest in the sector. Which.. Probably lent even more fuel to recent rhetoric from Guild Chief Bohor’s insistence we “attracted Bala’ur” with our neglect, the snotty old avian he was.
I sighed. Pushing my chair and myself away from the desk. Standing up and walking to the mirror. On the other end of the seeing glass I was met with a tired eyed Cyonian. The nocturnal browns of my coat, the flicking tail for balancing, the wide fluffed out and tired looking ears.. I could see past some of the fur on them to see the peach coloured flesh of the inside. My coat was- to say the least in a state of unrest. I’d been so excited to take up this course, this semester. The stars had aligned when I was accepted for a competitive profession such as journalism, not a lot of creatures on Atalor could flaunt that they’d schooled for such things.
Then had come the semesters on Coalition journalistic integrity policies. Publishing rules a book long. Ethical sourcing. Writing practices. Panic prevention. Restrictions on Bala’ur reporting, restrictions on war publishing, restrictions on-
I’d whined audibly, rubbing a paw to my face as my eyes closed. There was just... So much more than I’d even imagined. So many loops, hoops and branches to jump to get anything mildly controversial or scary past the editor’s phase. “That’s enough for now.” I breathed, my lighter toned voice had danced in the empty air of my apartment. I’d pulled an all-dayer so most places would be opening up soon. Maybe a stop to my favourite breakfast spot would do my mood well. I strapped my bag to saddle to my hip, plopping my writing tablet inside. Breakfast sounded good.
After a quick brush down of my fur I headed down to the front area of my apartment. The only problem? I spotted a familiar face by the street level entryway to the diner. Admittedly, I thought about going right back inside and then entering through the artificial branchways that dotted above the vehicle lanes, but he’d already spotted me.
“Yivreen, Yiv!” Came the excitable call from my project partner. His tail giving me a swish swish to hurry up.
Already I could feel myself sighing into a pleasant mask of smiles I put on for him. “Hey Geal. Good dusk.” I waved my tail back at him, a polite pair of ears turned at attention to him as I drew closer. He was a couple inches shorter than myself, and his little insistence of ‘just happening to be there’ so often around me was only mildly annoying.
Best I could tell he just needed a friend, and I’d been wrangled into it by circumstance of being linked with him for one of our projects. His excitable voice chipped up again like he’d just gotten out of bed. Bastard. “Good dusk to you too! Did you hear the news? Classes are cancelled tonight, apparently the campus had a grow-in in the basement. Some of the lower to the ground lecture halls soaked inches high!”
“A grow-in? It takes nights for a grow-in to cause any real damage, how’d they let roots get bad enough to spring piping?” I’d asked with an incredulous tone. “Beats me! But it means we have the night. Well. I have the night. It looks like you need some sleep once you’re done here.” Had come the reply.
I set a withering eye at him. The fact he’d been able to start reading my ‘I haven’t slept’ face was starting to mean he was becoming more than a clingy acquaintance. I stepped through the door, finding the early hours with the place mostly empty. Sliding into a booth without much trouble and finding my classmate doing the same across from me.
“I think I need to scrap my final project.” I mused out-loud, a bit too late to realize I’d said it to him.
“What? Why?”
I reached my graspers down and pawed over my tablet, letting the first opening pages pop up, and showing off the particularly problematic paragraphs I’d been staring at earlier. His face scrunched lightly. “A brief history of Coalition contact and the consequences of-” His face had gone from scrunched to worried. Geal had been unable to finish even saying the title of my project. “Yiv this is- why did you pick something like this?”
I squirmed, it was weird being judged by someone you only ever thought of as a mild nuisance. Had this idiot become a fixture in my life enough I valued his opinion? “Well! I thought I’d go for something a bit ah- controversial! Something to stir up my reputation on my way out, so I could land it well. Ahh... I think I might have taken it a step too far though..”
He gave an acknowledging flick of the ear. Scrolling through it with a skimming eye. His whiskers twitching in latent agitation at nothing in particular. “I mean... It’s not going to land you in good branches with the interplanetary affairs office. I can see what you’re going for though.” He pawed the slate back over to me. “Maybe lose the parts where you used your editorial tone to criticize the uplift years? I know it’s the new and fashionable thing to criticize the Coalition, but with the war we need herd unity yeah? I don’t think it’d be wise to add your voice to the disunity. Where’d you even get bit about the Guild only being permitted in city limits? The treaty doesn’t have that line now.” What he said was a common talking point from pro-Coalition talking heads in our own politics.
The Jungle burnings and the feeling we had been treated as a second class vassal state by the Coalition was swept aside as a necessary evil was a... resurfacing feeling that we hadn’t felt as a society for a long time, but war weariness was beginning to take its toll. People, myself included, needed to start looking at the war and the Coalition uplifts objectively.
“Places.” I managed back. “There’s... Old outposts in the Wildlands south that have some precursor logs still on them. From after Coalition night-” The night we’d first met our benefactors from the stars. “-but still old enough they had some tidbits we’ve ‘forgotten’ since the war started.” I put emphasis on forgotten, I wasn’t so sure it was accidentally forgotten we used to have a better deal in the treaty than tonight.
Some of the more grainy details, like an accidental burning down of a hanging settlement in the trees during an early Coalition burning operation was something even I’d not heard of until finding it myself. Heck, it might even be why there were so few branch-level villages out there anymore. We probably stopped building them wholesale.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
From then on we’d chatted a bit on it. I.. resigned myself to putting away some of my more problematic findings. There must have been good reason to not include them, I mean. The burned village had probably caused a panic back when it’d happened, I could only imagine now it’d spark some light of outrage my people hadn’t known for centuries against a galactic community that for all intents and purposes we were a fairly early member of. Our seniority was respected in most Coalition circles these nights, despite our chilly attitude with the Founders. There was a naysaying voice in my head now. Would all my project as it was written now do is distance my people from our respected pedestal in the galactic community?
Oh? Was my gentle chitchat conversation with Gael coming to an end? Thank the Obelisk.
A gentle nod of the head, and I’d been up and headed back to my room to catch some shut eye. Finding the door to my room, I slipped the key in with tired paws and stepped inside. Ah... Sweet bliss as I flopped into the big hammock-bed.
I’d barely even glimpsed the top news article on my tablet before I climbed up into the hanging nest-bed. “Comms relay upgrades due to temporarily disrupt traffic to and from Atalor.” Huh... A dismissive tail wave came with the news. Supposedly it’d only last the night. Ah well. Not like I was going to be awake for it- The net on our planet had plenty of backups of anything I might need to look at in that time. The threat to our planet in a comms blackout was nothing anyway, we had the strongest fleet in the sector despite being on the border with the hated enemy. I let my eyes drift closed, bundling myself into the sheets and drifting into a cocoon of much needed rest.
___________________________________
Thunder rocked through my mind, throwing me into consciousness. Concussive thump thump thumps jolting me to wakefulness and driving my heart rate up. A frightened squeak emanating from me before I realized what the noise was... Someone was knocking on my door, loudly. “O-one moment!” I called before slinking out of my bed. Tablet in paw. I looked down at it.. It was only three quarters of the way through the night, and tomorrow was a rest day. Who could possibly... It wasn’t some solicitor, they’d never have made it to the fourth floor before being thrown out.
I opened the door, looking like I’d just crawled out of bed. “What!?” I gave the annoyed ask before my eye had recognized Geal again. He’d known my address for a while now, since I’d /given/ him it, but he’d never came unless it was for school work.
“Aa-a Yiv! Can I come in?” He asked politely, his eyes fidgeting left and right down the hall.
“This isn’t going to be some weird love confession right?” I flatly replied. You never knew with guys like this.
“Wha- N-no! It’s important. Listen just- I’m not like that. I just trust you.” I felt my eyes roll. “Fine.” As I moved out of the way and ushered him in with my tail, shutting the door behind the both of us. “What’s this about?”
He was wearing a vest, which wasn’t entirely usual. Maybe he’d needed the pocket space? “I was just auh- so. What your paper said in the diner. I wanted to find out more.” No.
“Oh come on Geal you didn’t-” He waved his tail to shush me, and then gave an affirmative up and down with the appendage. “I did. I tried to scour the university archives for that incident you talked about. The... burned village.” Came the verbal confirmation. “But... There wasn’t really anything beyond what we were taught as children. Just the moss-heaps about the ranger accords.”
And oh mercy he’d just kept on talking as I sat myself on the couch with a concerned look on my face. “See, that got me curious. Why would they hide that sort of thing even from academic records right? And then I saw the news about how we were cut off from the Coalition communication network for the night. And then-”
I cut him off with an annoyed huff. “Geal you’ve never struck me as the paranoid type.” Which was true. I’d never seen him getting fired up about anything like this.
“Hey- aa.. I just feel more comfortable talking about this with someone who apparently goes to forbidden outposts for scoops as old as my great great great grandparents.” Alright. Point taken, I flicked my ear to indicate he continue.
“So. I started looking back at our voting records in the Coalition Assembly.” Ah. That made sense, even with the network cut off there would be archives of common things like that. I was listening intently now. The grumpiness from my early awakening dissipating. “We’ve voted against majority votes lead by the Founders at a rate of seventy-eight percent since our induction as a voting member. And that number has only historically climbed. Now, the Coalition’s assembly is up to vote for extending another emergency power term of ten years to the Assembly chair-”
I cut him off. “-Aerun is the current chairholder. A Founder.” He gave me a bright eyed flick of the ear. The implication... “Well how would communication downtime impede our vote?” I asked.
“It’s not about that I don’t think. See. Our representatives for a long time have presented leading and sustainable arguments against Founder war policies. Even moreso in the last couple years. What they need is for our representative to not be able to attend remotely.” To prevent swinging neutral votes. Made sense. Our main representatives usually hologram into the assembly remotely, rather than maintaining an ambassadorial party on the Founder’s homeworld of Ancestra. I could see the political intrigue all slotting together. Our relations with the Founders had been cold, but this was freezing if true.
“So what?” I asked, giving him a questioning head tilt. “Sooo- Yiv! This is the perfect end of term project! You can amalgamate it with what you already have for your paper. We can work together! You and me, we’ll forage the case and find evidence! There’s no way they’ll get upset over us joining our papers together if it’s this good. Imagine! ‘The Sinister Truth, a cold war between Atalor and Ancestra.’”
I snorted. “That’s stupid! And it breaks way too many anti-panic laws for a title. Try again swamp-brain!” I whisked my tail at him in chiding way. There was no way something so hyperbolic would ever be accepted. “F-fine. Working title. The point is, you and me should go out tomorrow and work on it.”
He’d sat himself across from me in that filled bag-seat. My own voice coming to me with some level of doubt. “So, you /do/ want to go out?” I teased, before quickly amending. “How does by the third level labs around midnight sound? You bring the food.” I set terms simply enough. All he managed was an affirmative flick of the ear and yes of his tail. Standing up with a hop. “That was auh- easy! I kind of expected you to be more nervous like this morning.”
“I am nervous.” Came the truth. “I’m just more interested if we can find anything to back up your theory. It could serve our herd far and above any other opportunity we’ll probably ever see in this line of work again.” And I felt it. Whereas before I was just kind of digging in the ashes of ancient history with my paper, this sort of foraging of news could change our planet’s outlook on the Founders, and with any luck elevate someone better suited to leading the united species against the Bala’ur instead of Aerun.
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The rest of the night had been spent alone in my thoughts, laying on my hanging nest-bed on my back as I contemplated what could happen. If it was worth it. That bundle of anxious, cold energy has bubbled up from my stomach again. The same energy that’d made me put down my paper last Dusk. “Hhh.. Why’d I have to be born on such a belligerent world.” You didn’t hear about the Dommis having political shadow scuffles over war policy with other members of the Coalition. Heh... Those silly song birds probably couldn’t lie if they wanted to. They were good neighbours, all things considered.
I needed a climb. The sun would be up soon, might as well get it all out before I try sleeping. With little trouble I threw on my belted hip bag, and a jacket. It’d be a bit hot in the tropical weather of Barr City, but I didn’t feel like combing down my fur, and I didn’t want people to see my fur’s bedraggled state. I slipped my tablet and a water bottle into the pockets of the jacket and opened my apartment window out into the welcoming air.
Hopping out on my fores and legs I turned around, pulling the window closed and locking it up. From there? Simple as following some of the artificial branch paths. The paths always seemed to help me slow down my mind, put things into perspective. The branches themselves had been designed to simulate moving from tree to tree in a forest, and many chose to take them over walking below on the sidewalks because they gave a bit of recreation in what was otherwise a dull city with a well off educational sector and an imports hub. Which meant I usually got first pickings on ordering foreign knickknacks. I could see a couple people of varying Coalition species walking the streets below aside from the vehicles. Hmh.
My body was moving from branch to branch, my legs and arms moving with an arboreal-quadruped locomotion. “Hmm hm hmmm~” I’d taken to humming as I broke out into second street, hoisting my arms up and over myself as I dropped a floor’s worth of branches to land on the third, then the second floor branches with little hops. With more ‘cover’ above me and less below me I could see I was nearing a suburb at the end of my apartment’s street. The shorter buildings instead featuring twine and rope in place of the purpose made gymnastic equipment of the city’s thicket. And of that it only lead down to the ground, an end to this route, unless I wanted to walk or start jumping on people’s rooftops. Which... was going to be seen as rude.
And then... Something strange happened. I heard a couple gasps from above me, up in the higher levels. “Look!” Someone had shouted. My head hinging up, and eyes turning skyward for what little I could see from there. Were those...? Meteor showers? No. they weren’t streaking. They were moving closer. I’d never seen anything like it before in my life. Little puffs of light in the night sky like twinkling orange stars-
No. My eyes widened, and my chest felt like it was wearing a sweater four times too small. But then, of course, the shouting had started. Alarm calls. Then the sirens blaring across the streets. Another sound I’d never heard before. “A Bala’ur incursion in system has been confirmed. Please proceed to-” But my ears were already flattening, my perception of reality warped between life and death.
My imagination conjuring up those shadowy-grey images. Killers. Teeth. Cattle. Cruelty. Fly. Escape. Run. Climb! A miasma of horrifying, not quite corporeal Bala’ur chuckling within the confines of my own mind.
When I blinked back into reality I realized my body had been moving for minutes without me, just pounding away at the branches toward the lit up neon signs showing the way to the bunker. If I made it there!
Whho-omp boom. As a slicing bright light filled the sky, causing me and everyone around to shield our sensitive eyes. That’d landed in the inner city! And then? The shockwave, the sound. Both crashing into me. I flew into the air, cursing my flimsy grip at a time like this as I sailed back from the concussion of the clustering city levelling bombs that’d landed mercifully far away enough to not kill me immediately.
I sailed right past the gymnastic branches and into the tangle of catching ropes. My arms and legs instinctually tangling into them to suspend my fall. There were screams, panic. “How have they already started dropping bombs?! It’s impossible! They’ve have never made it past the fleet! Never past the defensive belt!” I screamed at the impossibility, mind desperately negotiating against the reality I was dealing with.
An older feminine voice from below me responded even as I climbed down. “They didn’t wait to defeat the fleet this time.” Whatever I’d been planning to say was caught in my throat as more explosions rocked downtown, concussive forces drilling and drilling...
I needed to find my relatives in the western suburbs, my nephews and nieces must be terrified! I needed to call Geal on my pad, maybe he survived? I needed to make a plan. I needed to- another explosion rocked through, and the sights of little dots that denoted incoming ships from orbit. I’d never seen those before, but I knew what they could be. I didn’t need to do anything. My mind was already conjuring up more wispy ghosts of feathered horrors, chasing me down and tearing my throat out.
Screaming, panic, alarms, the buffeting winds of millions dead with each bombfall- it all melted together into a dinner bell gonging away my last moments if I didn’t flee. I could feel saliva dripping down my back, despite none being there. My head whipped around in a blind panic to find the danger that wasn’t even here yet.
My instincts decided to run. My instincts chose to flee as fast and far away from Barr as I could go. It wasn’t quite me holding the berry branches in my mind anymore, only panic. The rest of it... All a blur.