History and Timeline:First Contacts
 History and Timeline
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The first contacts with other species is to be described here, the Humans in some general detail, so as not to be redundant in the other descriptions.
Humans
The first species Humanity met were the Mishtali, being a bronze-age nomadic culture when an Unadorned colony ship reached their planet.
Next, the pre-technological precursors to the Dgn and Shmrn were discovered in a joint Lightbearer/Shaper expedition to Beckett's Murky Venture. Both factions collaborated on advancing the species to usefulness, and, having met with some initial success, refined their experiments on their own, resulting in the distinct branching into the Shapers' Dgn and Lightbearers' Shmrn.
Following that, the Klk'k were discovered by the Lightbearers. The Lightbearers then proceeded to attempt to subjugate Ktah, but their efforts are greatly interrupted by the discovery of this effort, some mere weeks after it has begun, by the Andolian. Some hundreds of millions of Klk'k deaths later, Ktah was liberated and the war between the Andolian and Lightbearers hit full stride.
In the next round of expansions after the war, the Andolian encountered the Purth and began their experiments in raising them to group sapience. The war, however, had the effect of slowing the expansion rates of all factions as they geared up their military schedules, and this slowness continued throughout the early years of the Confederation, as the realities of interstellar war and of more advanced alien species than the bronze aged Mishtali heightened various fears.
Thus, it was not a few decades after the formation of the Confederation that humanity first encountered the Rlaan (in particular a Shaper exploration craft encountered a Rlaan patrol in an uninhabited system), whom they would likely have met mere years later save for the war. The Rlaan were then themselves responsible for vastly increased military budgeting, likewise slowing the progress of expansion. Through the Rlaan, humanity became aware of the Uln, and established diplomatic contact.
The Aera were first encountered 51 years prior to the Vega Strike start date of 3276. The Uln were the first to be contacted by the Aera, then the Rlaan, and then the Shmrn, Confed, and Forsaken. The Aera continued to expand at breakneck pace until the border regions were reasonably flush with all of their neighbors. Finding themselves boxed in, they sought a diplomatic solution to passage beyond the territory of the other factions. As these negotiations proved, as most had expected, utterly fruitless, the Aera, believing the balkanized humans to be manageable in the absence of the Rlaan, attempted to sneak a colony convoy through Rlaan space, risking provoking the Rlaan. However, intelligence failures lead to the risky venture being even more disastrous than initially considered possible, as the destruction of numerous Rlaan civilian vessels by the convoy upon its detection lead to a larger and more concerted than the Aera had believed the Rlaan capable of. Indeed, in the first few months of the Rlaan retaliation, the Aera lost many of their newly founded colonies near the Rlaan border. However, as the Rlaan fleets pushed further into Aera territory, the more developed defenses ground the conflict to a bloody standstill, with the Rlaan being uninterested in allowing the number of casualties that would be need to be sustained to penetrate further, and with their initial fury fading over the course of 8 years, the conflict on the Rlaan-Aera border, while technically unresolved, is in a state of indefinite cease-fire.
As this conflict raged, human space bustled with fear born military spending. When a cease-fire was declared between the Rlaan and Aera, the Aera returned to the negotiating table with the Confederation. While they were more amenable than before, few believed it to be anything more than a stall for time to rebuild and regroup their fleets for an invasion of human space. Thus, over the next several years, the Confederation massed more and more craft near the Aera border, the Aera decried the actions as sabre-rattling, put forward proposals for coreward passage they knew would be rejected, and licked their wounds. Then, in a move whose timing caught the Confederation somewhat off guard in that it came sooner than expected, Aera fleets launched a surprise attack cutting into Forsaken territory, partially exposing less defended portions of the Confederation-Forsaken border and starting the current war.
Rlaan
The Rlaan's first encounter was with the Saahasayaay, a stone age culture. After noting the difficulties with working with an already developed species, and ethically inclined not to lobotomize them all, the Rlaan looked over pre-sapient species found on other worlds, and deciced they'd have a go at creating species more amenable to being manipulated into doing things the Rlaan would rather not do. Thus the Rlaan created the Lmpl and Nuhln.
The Rlaan then encountered the Uln, whom they found somewhat boring, but then soon after encountered the Humans, whom some of the Rlaan found so interesting that an anthro-phile movement, the Rlaan Briin, gained a noteworthy following, if assuredly comprising a very small minority of the Rlaan population. The Rlaan were more disturbed than interested in the Aera, and were entirely ill at ease with the speed at which they had expanded from their homeworld.
Aera
The Aera found the Bzbr quite early on in their interstellar exploring. Documents on the Bzbr found elsewhere in the species writeups explain most of what there is to say about that... The Aera, upon meeting the Uln, increased their exploration efforts in order to claim as much territory as possible before the Humans and Rlaan that they had learned about from the Uln could claim it. Upon learning they were boxed in, the Aera set about serious negotiations for rights assuring continued expansion beyond the regions controlled by the Humans and Rlaan, but were quickly rebuffed, as such seemed likely to lead to the Humans and Rlaan being engulfed on all fronts by the Aera, which, while the Aera thought it a lovely idea that would allow them to marginalize the threat posed by the Humans and Rlaan, the Humans and Rlaan wanted no part of.
See Also
- Source: grab bag April 6th 2004
