Welcome to Gaia! ::

Naturally a little ticked off by the bravado, Tika retracted the insect parts he'd mimicked from the girl, and instead began to extend varied growths from his back; tentacles, scythe-arms not unlike the lead-male's, two pairs of beetle-like pincers, and to top it off, some delicate and enormous dragonfly wings, courtesy of Earth. Useless, of course, he would use telekinesis to fly if necessary, and he was far too heavy for the ornamental wings to grant him much in the way of gliding, never mind flight itself.

"No." He finally replied.

Before I came to Gaia, before I met Ki'Rasa. Before I even left Aastaium, I was a bit of a rogue. I didn't exactly abuse my powers, since there was no law defining such things, but I did end up taking over the planet and creating a two mile high black tower of what was apparently my own hatred for the world. Evidently, these guys learned about it after all. Just little missy bug here doesn't know a thing.

Anyway, stay cool. I have it under control.

The moment that Tika's transformation had begun a look of surprise had crossed the males' faces. Several began to mutter among themselves, and the self appointed leader stepped forward.

"You are the Hate Bringer. Leave this land at once, and never return." He said with conviction, but giveaway traces of fear pheremones.

'Ah,' thought Tika. 'they do recognise me after all.'
He went with the assumption, that he was still the same person that he had once become, a person that he had left behind long ago.

"I will crush your necks if you do not answer my ******** QUESTIONS!"

A stunned silence.

"That's better. Now tell me every goddamned thing you know about me, my race, and your race." He enjoyed putting on this act. His bloodlust for the moment was almost non-existent, but these apparently omni-better bugs didn't know that. Tika's power evidently outranked their natural ability, which wasn't surprising; his power had been designed to make him superior to a demi-god, after all.

"It will... take time. There is a lot to tell, we all know of the Truth, save for the little ones, until they reach the right age." He indicted the girl in Tika's grip.


[Time skip will commence after Rain's next post]

"Wesley forgot I was there." Ocarina said forlornly.

What he really said was, "I'm just observing quietly."


[About half an hour and multiple checks later]


Tika wasn't too impressed with the underground city of the bug people, whose name he still hadn't learned.
Sure, the city was easily twelve miles in diameter at it's widest points, and buried some half a mile under the surface, but it was.... gay. It was somehow actually ******** ******** simply because it was new to him and he didn't know it was there.

"Nice place." He'd muttered as they'd first passed the bedrock in a levitating platform and been greeted to twelve miles of open air all around, and twinkling lights of the city below.
He'd long since retracted the various appendages from his back, as they were only getting in the way.


Now they were all sat in a convference chamber. The seat was nice, really comfortable, and came with full recline and massage features.

The apparent Council of Elders all looked no older than their thirties, and had done so for several centuries.
The overall ranking patriarch was a rather stunning fellow dressed in magenta robes, and bearing a full hardened wingcase on his back. He sat in a specially designed chair to allow this large genetic adaptation, and looked at Tika and Mark with scornful eyes.

At the nod of the head to an assistant, who pressed a button on some sort of control pad, Ocarina and Charon appeared within the chamber.

"Well then." He said, followed by a long pause. "We have been discovered again. We simply erase the memories from others, Aastaian-Human, Cornelian-Human, visitors from the many Earth realities that seem so rife.
But you two, we already know we cannot. You both have certain abilities, traits, and genetic alterations that our technology cannot overcome, and it is for this reason alone that we will divulge the information you so desire."

He cleared his throat, and continued. "We do not like you. We do not hate you. We simply wish that you had never captured young Teklipa. What I will tell you, and I will tel you everything, you must take to your graves. Your computerised companions can freely record everything that is said here now, but cannot share the data with any other technological systems or biological organisms.
We have a very specific calendar, a schedule, and in due time we will tell your people the Truth." He spoke the last words to Tika directly.

"Get on with it." Tika growled back. He was already dreading the outcome of 'the Truth', capitalised as though that meant something, and he thougt he had a fair idea of what it was.

(( And that's where I leave it to go to bed! You'll have to wait to find out what the 'Truth' is xp ))

But Mark was important. The Cornelian and Aastaian peoples were closely meshed, more so than any relations Aastaians held to other races from other realities.
So if his owner could just stop the angsty s**t, it would be great.
The chamber was also translating the Aastaian language for him.


"Very well. Let us begin eighty million years ago--"

"Ha!"

A pause, and the Elder continued when he realised that there was no followup to the interruption.

"Around eighty million years ago we reached a certain peak in genetic research. By combining teleportation arrays with DNA resequencers, we were able to take an entire species of sea creature and alter it's genetic makeup in one go, across the entire planet. We wanted to create a long term project that we could monitor for millennia to come.
We placed certain genetic markers, too, that would trigger specific changes at certain stages. These included the progression into a typical primate body, and the development of neural pathways which lead to our language being created in your species, eventually.
And your physiology, of course you'll want to know about that. We thought it would be... nice... to give you certain advantages over primate-humans. You do see what I am trying to realise to you? We made you."

He paused again, and again sensed no interruption. "Your race showed remarkable development, and we didn't need to intervene nearly as much as we thought we would.
Then came the ship. With your race at a stage where it had machinery to watch the sky, we couldn't use satellites. Regrettably, we didn't have the cloaking technology you developed later on.
When that ship crashed, we simply couldn't react fast enough. So we altered our plans and our observations, and we vastly increased our understanding of concealing technology."

Tika grinned at this point. He'd learned all he needed to know, and there was no refuting that it explained a ******** of a lot.

"That's enough." He said sternly, rising from his seat and flexing his fingers, stretching his back.

"Mark? Ocarina, Charon. We're leaving now."

"What do you plan to do now?" Asked the Elder. His poorly masked fear seeped out into his facial features like a leaking pipe.

Tika savoured that look of fear from a supposedly superior species, then flashed an award winning smile.

"Leave here. Wait for the scheduled appointment at the shipyard, get Mark's ship fixed. Leave Aastaium. Why?" He finished with the question, asked in a tone that let the Elder know that Tika realised how scared he was.

"Heh..." Ocarina simply could not comprehend the existence of a civilisation over eighty million years old. And that was only the Aastaian part of their history. The parts of the civilisation that they'd been exposed to must only have been fleeting glimpses of on iceberg much larger than one first thought.

"These people were advanced enough to change the evolution of a species over eighty million years ago. Their technology must expand beyond this, surely." He said quietly to Charon.

The Elder looked to Mark, as though hearing the thought. Which he had, actually.
He then looked to Tika, puzzled expression on his face.

"Does this one" He pointed slender finger in Mark's direction "Not know of the crashed Earth Exodus vessel that started the Aastaian technological era?"

"I said, we're lea--" Tika stopped himself short halfway through the question.

He too turned to Mark. "Mark? You didn't know?"

"Mark, it was a Cornelian ship. The Lysithea, if I recall.

"It was."

Tika gave a grunt, nodding to Ocarina. "Thanks."

"It crashed on Aastaium around three thousand two hundred years ago. It took a while for what passed as scientists in those days to get a grip of it, and then the AI on board awoke, and figured out a simple translation protocol in a matter of days.
It contained a database on pretty much everything to do with scientific research of the time, as well as it's cargo inventory. It had been carrying a prototype of some form of weapon, original purpose wasn't catalogued, of course.
The weapon destabilised as the ship was breaking orbit, it went off, or something, and the entire ship was transported to Aastaium's reality, caught by the planet's slightly stronger gravity, uh, we have no moon, by the way; it never broke off, and so the ship fell back down and...... poof. Hit the dirt, so to speak."

He paused for a breath. "Obviously the weapon wasn't designed for interdimensional comings and goings, and that was evident in the fact that it hadn't transported the crew with it and the ship. Nothing organic, in fact. The ones who searched the entire ship no found traces of food, people, even cotton clothing derived from the cotton plant."

The Elder laughed aloud, part scorn, part embarrassed amusement. He didn't mean to offend Mark with the laugh, but that's sure the way it sounded.

"No, of course not. The ship did not ruin our plans entirely; we just had to rethink them a little. We had our own scientists aboard that vessel, easily passed off as Aastaian. They conluded that the weapon was intended to produce a soliton. The results of which are catastrophic. We, however, surpassed that level of technology long ago and could easily block or even send back a soliton."

He grinned.

"Well over eighty million years of technological development? We ask these guys for a teleport out of this nice little city, and a quick fix of your ship, eh?"

Oh, such a rudeboi.