The Core: The Dark Enemy

26: Earlier wars

So much had changed since the last time I was here. There were Blidda children in the halls, families living outside of stasis, and activities going on in each part of the ship that we passed. I even spied shops, or their equivalent, set up in offshoot hallways for families to browse at their leisure. From what I gathered on the way to the command deck the changes that Meditati put in place, both protective and maintenance-wise, were enough to let the Blidda onboard return to living and even thrive. There was water and food in abundance and life seemed good.

Worthwhile even.

It made me wonder what sort of requests they had in mind. Did they want me to find them a new planet or something? Surely with their race's history at pinging the cosmos, they would already have enough celestial body data logged to do so themselves. What then could I offer that they couldn't achieve themselves?

As I observed the young Blidda girl, named Vilnn, rush away to show off her newly animated Ginny doll to her friends, I realized that my simple guesses were probably well off the mark. Vilnn's friends, it seemed, also already had robotic dolls of their own. At least from the pre-recorded dance moves they were demonstrating as the children who owned them liked to show off. All of the other dolls and toys looked polished and painted, not like the well-worn and deeply loved look that Ginny gave off.

Oh well, Ginny could handle anything that came her way and would protect Vilnn to the best of its ability. I didn't need to worry about them anymore.

---

- The story of how the U'lennea came to be -

Long before the Tela rose to power, the alien race currently known as the U'lennea fought for supremacy inside a petri dish of a crazed researcher.

The researcher, being well into her years and bored with her limited declining lot in life, enjoyed pitting her creations against each other. She was no longer employed by the top government research labs and had since been relegated to the natural ending all females of her forgotten race endured once their usefulness was used up.

Her race, resembling a very mobile adaptation of Earth's sea urchin, had a rigid spiky shell structure with mobility limbs that could grow from any direction if given the space to break through the exoskeleton. Each metallic spike could act as a mouth, weapon, or needle as needed, letting the scientist gather hard-to-reach cells and viruses within creatures' bodies or through dense layers of muck and soil. Her race was well suited for the very rough environment of her planet, one that most other aliens would consider being a living hell.

Her planet, or collection of planets, were all set evenly and closely spaced in orbit around an ancient angry star. The order and layout of the surrounding solar system were strange, even to an uneducated budding astronomer's eye, as it was almost as though the solar system had been created by a being who wanted to imitate the life cycle of a virus, setting the gapped planets up as living heavenly bodies with which to tempt the aggressive creatures and beings to strive to continually migrate between.

It was a trial by fire existence and the natives thrived in it or died.

This habitat existed for ages until the LOW arrived.

Upon arrival, the LOW studied the solar system in depth before picking out one species they considered viable for Uplifting and subjugation. They needed able bodies to carry out their research of the anomalous solar system, seeing as most expeditions to any of the planets tended to end in disaster. They set the researcher's kind up as the alpha race, teaching them about technology, and how to catalog and delve into the mysteries of the necklace of planets on their behalf. The LOW paid the newly Uplifted species for their discoveries and any of the harvested oddities located deep in the planet's core.