---Play---
“Will you sit down, girl, I can’t relax with you hovering like that(!)” says Emiko with a pretence of frustration.
“Mistress Miyazaki… if you are approached from behind…” says Ms. Hunter, face placid and unreadable.
“If I am approached from behind, in a room full of people, someone will spot the attacker, won’t they? If you’re worried that anyone at the table has intentions on my life, then you’d surely be better placed to protect me in this space between me and your girlfriend, wouldn’t you?” grins Emiko.
Ms. Hunter has a brief and (to me) unreadable expression pass over her face as she takes her seat between Emiko and Lt. Lo… Xon.
Everyone’s attention returns to the tabletop.
A display of a miniature warzone is projected there.
In front of Kas stands an army of mechanical… vaguely humanoid skeletons… there were a lot more at the start of the game…
In front of Jennie stands an army of green humanoids with tusks, whose technology looks to have been cobbled together from scrap metal. She definitely appears to be winning… based solely on numbers…
In front of Victor stands a fortress, defended by Terrans… after a fashion.
The odd one, whose body or head is fully exposed, look like Homo sapiens… the rest… well they’re nearly as wide as they are tall and have an overall volume that make the black armour they wear look less like armour and more like small mechsuits(!)… Are they mechsuits?
The usual sleekness of Terran battle-armour is, in this universe, adorned with symbols, the full significance of many of which I’m certain must be missing my beak(!) There are a lot of Human skulls on them, though!
The way they’ve been fighting thus far… has been… frightening, as has Victor’s [roleplay]. This seems to be a canon in which, not only are Humans exactly the terrifying monsters we always imagined deathworlders would be but every race in the galaxy is, as well! Leading to a state of constant all-out war!
“How old is this game?” I quietly ask Brunhilda.
“This? Seven hundred years… eight? I’d guess closer to seven.”
“And… your battle armour… it didn’t look like that in that period… did it?” I query, fairly certain I know the answer.
She chuckles “No… that style of armour wasn’t viable until we had durasteel… had to wait until about two hundred years ago. Of course… it wasn’t really all that useful until the First Contact War.”
I consider the fact that Terrans so closely predicted the style of armour they wouldn’t have for [half a millennium]!
Kas raises a fist containing many cuboid random number generators which she scatters on the table.
She enters a command I don’t fully comprehend, with a stony face… though, unlike the unreadable expression that Ms. Hunter always wears… I can see furious calculation going on behind her eyes.
Her gleaming, steel skeletons advance on Jennie’s army of monsters and… fail to have much effect.
“Krush dem all!” screams Jennie, rolling her cubes while [roleplaying] the personality apparently assigned to her faction.
Indeed, her rolls allow her to finish the last of Kas’ forces.
Kas throws up her arms and says “This game is impossible! How are you meant to win!?” now having dropped the ice cold silence that was her [roleplay].
“Bein’ betta!” says Jennie, not dropping her façade.
This causes Kas to screw up her eyes and purse her lips in a mocking expression.
It’s Victor’s turn and, affecting a sophisticated manner of speech that is translated to make him sound like the son of a Clanmother (though with harshness and aggression that I’m sure no Clanmother’s progeny has ever had) and using his holopad, hung at his neck, as a voicechanger to give his voice a gravelly, garbled, robotic quality, says “Sons and Daughters of the Imperium, forgive me that I must order you to waste ammunition against the worthless bodies of these xeno scum! Those who would dare defile our Holy City must have their carcasses cast from its walls! This is OUR City! This is OUR world! Cry it out so the bastards in orbit will hear our fury! GLORY TO THE GOD EMPEROR!!!”
He casts his randomisers and then screams “FIRE!!!” immediately followed by his forces unleashing a withering volley against Jennie’s.
About a quarter of her remaining monsters are felled by Victor’s attack… but she still outnumbers him…
It being her turn now, she releases her chance pieces and smiles before entering a command that sees Victor’s walls scaled and troops massacred in bloody [hand-to-hand].
“WAAAGH!" she screams as his troops are hacked apart by hers.
Her turn ended, Victor looks certain to have lost, only having a handful of troops remaining, entirely surrounded by Jennie’s green, tusked monsters.
With no [roleplay], this time, he scoops up his cubes and drops them… before a sinister smile adorns his face.
“Exterminatus…” he says, now affecting sombre disconsolation.
Shock breaks over my face as the arena is engulfed in vicious explosions.
If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.
When the firestorm is cleared, it reveals no surviving troops, of any faction.
Victor throws up his hands in triumph.
“I am undefeated!” fearsome pretence now dropped and holopad inferring (presumably from its interface with his translator) that he does not wish this speech to be roboticised.
“Bullshit, you are!” cries Jennie with an accusing point “Every time you start losing, you pull an exterminatus out of your arse!”
Victor smirks “Yes… thus makin’ me undefeated… you did agree to play with it enabled as an option!”
“I think we’re going to need to revisit that decision.” says Kas with a cocked eyebrow “I realise that the game is a lot less fun when you can just flip the table whenever you’re going to lose. How long do you think your undefeated streak will last if you can't blow everyone up from orbit to force a draw?”
I interrupt, still rather horrified “I’m sorry, Victor just used orbital bombardment… on his own troops?!”
Jennie gives a mirthful smirk “Not just orbital bombardment, Captain, he glassed the planet!”
I look around the room and see no indication of deception…
“I’ll never understand how you Terrans can be such [teddybears], in real life, and yet have such horrible imaginations!” I say, shaking my head to convey my disbelief.
To my knowledge, the GU never even considered glassing worlds until our War with the Terrans (long after we had the capability to do so)!
To imagine it when your species hasn’t even left your home system!
To imagine glassing your own world, simply to deny it to an enemy!…
My musing on that is interrupted by Brunhilda asking “Hey… guys do you ever think that… well, we consume a lot of pop culture from the twentieth and twenty first centuries, don’t we?” her hands absently working through the fur of, a very comfortable looking, Sam.
“How d’ya figure?” asks Victor, one arm now around, a content looking, Tuun, the other hand between, a blissful looking, Fluffy’s ears.
She frowns “Well… this… the film we watched the other week… the amount of early Tech Age songs we sing, games we play, books we know, films we watch, etc. etc… You think, if someone was watching us from the twenty first century, they might come to the conclusion that there had been no cultural development for the centuries in between then and now?”
Jennie laughs “That’s what you’d be worried about in that scenario, Hildy? Not the fifth dimensional peeping Toms?… You’d be worried about them being judgemental of our pop culture choices?”
“Well… when you put it like that(!)…” responds Brunhilda.
Victor has a pensive expression on his face as he says “I think you’re right, Samus. I think if someone was lookin’ in on us, it very easily could look to ’em like there’s been no pop culture since about 2050… but I think that’d be for a very specific reason…”
“Why don’t you enlighten us(?)…” interjects Hasiakh, her arms and tail firmly encasing, a relaxed looking, Krish.
“Well, it’d be, ’cause they’d skip over all the stuff that wouldn’t mean nothin’ to ’em, wouldn’t it? They ain’t gonna be interested in watchin’ us watch films from the 25th century, or listen to the latest hits by Fleem X, are they?!… Wouldn’t mean nothin’ to ’em… they’d be much more interested in us enjoyin’ stuff that they knew, stuff they enjoyed, stuff they understood… If you cherrypick only the early Tech Age pop culture we enjoy, it’d look like we’d either had a barren cultural dark age for the last six or seven hundred years… oooor… like we were all huge nerds for early Tech Age stuff… wouldn’t it?”
There is a silence as the room, at large, considers that.
The silence is broken by Krish, speaking out, from beneath his serpentine girlfriend’s head “On a complete subject change… I have a question for you… Err, I’d really prefer not to call you ‘Mistress Miyazaki’…”
Emiko smiles “You can call me ‘Emiko’… I keep telling this one to call me that but she insists on maintaining a professional relationship with me!” she says, indicating Ms. Hunter “I’ve never been particularly in love with being ‘Mistress Miyazaki’, either(!)… what’s your question, young man?”
“I was just wondering about the planet… from the sounds of it… they haven’t even developed radio transmissions yet… isn’t there a risk of cultural contamination? We could drastically effect the way they view existence, couldn’t we? If they’re banging rocks together to make spears and we tear out of the sky in a starship… isn’t there a pretty high chance that they’ll… I don’t know… think we’re gods or something?” says Krish, apprehensively.
Emiko smiles “Ah… you’re asking if there isn’t some Prime Directive? If we might get all the way out there and find that they’re too primitive to contact at the moment and we need to turn back?… I’m going to turn this question over to the room’s only gardenworlder… Tcakqaal…” she turns her head to me “…before Terran First Contact, what was the GU’s policy on First Contacts?”
Feeling slightly put on the spot by her asking me a question she clearly knows the answer to, I think before saying “Well… it was… to get to sapient species as early as we could, offer them a seat in Parliament, work out a plan for technological, cultural and population exchange and… I suppose ‘bring them into the fold’… we considered it a moderate failure if a species had managed to get starbound before we’d found them…”
She gives an approving smile and nods “And why did you want to get to them so early…?”
I consider “…I suppose… [humanitarian] reasons? That’s not exactly how we would have put it… it was thought about more in terms of the calculus of survival… they are better off spread across multiple worlds with access to the technology that has come from uncountable eons of trial and error, rather than bound, precariously, to a single planet with only what they’ve been able to develop themselves, and we are better off with one more unique species’ perspective on any problem… there are ways of thinking that any species will have that will be unique to them… allowing them to solve problems that we can’t… it’s better to be friends… I suppose.” now that I say it aloud, I realise how much it sounds like Terran reasoning… ‘we want more friends don’t we?! More friends=better!’(!)
“And… how much thought was given to cultural contamination?” she asks, again clearly knowing the answer.
“Effectively… none. It was assumed that no culture could be so memetic as to replace that of an entirely different species… that no species could be so influenceable as to have their culture erased by contact with outsiders. There… would be loanwords… concepts they hadn’t thought about… concepts they had thought about that no one else had… but that would be about the extent of it.”
Miyazaki smiles “Put your hand up if you think that’s true…”
No one’s hand goes up.
“Obviously, Terran history is fraught with examples of cultural erasure and assimilation after first contacts between people (something almost unheard of on preContact gardenworlds). Usually, not through memeticism but rather military might and greed… it took us a long time to get over the zero sum thinking of our Agricultural Age… ‘in order for me to have more, someone else must have less! In order for me to win, someone else must lose!’… that’s a mindset that carried on right up until Unification… However, the ODR is now equipped with protocols for First Contact from both gardenworld doctrine and deathworld doctrine. We are reasonably confident that we can avoid any headhunting wars, like the Ecuadorian Shuar had, and societal breakdowns, like what happened to the Yir-Yoront of Australia. We’re also pretty sure we can avoid being worshipped as gods(!)” she winks to Krish.
Just then Twila says “Plus Ultra are on their way here… I assume we want to let them in?”
She is met by a chorus of agreement.
A few moments pass before the Commonroom door opens followed by three Humans and two gardenworlders entering the room, uncertainly.
Four fifths of the group freeze upon seeing Fluffy… Ms. Petrikov strides forward straight to her.
“She’s gorgeous! Can I give her a hug?” she addresses Victor.
“Sure…” he smiles “… she ain’t got a translator anymore but… well, she’ll let us know if she ain’t in the mood to be touched(!)”
The diminutive woman buries her arms in Fluffy’s fur and presses the side of her face against her shoulder.
Fluffy turns her head to give the other side of Petrikov’s face a lick with her enormous tongue.
“Gah! So rough!” shrieks a laughing Petrikov.
“Ah… sorry… probably shoulda warned you she’d want a lick!”