The last time I talked about this universe, I kind of made it seem like the
war that the natives started against the Ochivari was simple and quick. They
lured a ship back to their version of Earth, attacked it, won, and stole it.
Of course, the process was a lot more complicated than that, and actually
took quite a bit of time. The human confederates that the native Earthans
captured were surprisingly resilient to interrogation. This was because they
were conditioned not to fear pain, but to enjoy it. It was more than this,
though. These ones were young enough to have received advanced medical
treatments, which actually scrambled the pain and pleasure centers of their
brains. The natives didn’t physically torture them, but they did try to make
their stay uncomfortable, by keeping them in small cells, and forcing them
to sleep on stone floors. They didn’t starve them, but they fed them very
little, and they played loud music while they were trying to sleep. The
confederates enjoyed much of this, though, so they realized they had to come
up with a new strategy. They put each of them in deeper isolation.
Soundproof rooms with no sources of light, and no human interaction, was
worse than torture for these people, because it was boring. Still, they
didn’t crack immediately. It took months for them to beg to be shown even
one ray of sunshine. At this point, they would tell the natives anything
they wanted to know. All this time, the world’s various governments were
holding a sort of competition-recruitment program. Each nation was expected
to supply one of the top experts in their fields. Some countries gave their
best engineers, while others their best fighters, etc. They then trained
what they called The Squadron to work together, and prepare to fight their
common enemy.
By the time the Squadron was ready, so were the confederates, to give up the
information necessary to start this war. They contacted the Ochivari for
rescue, requesting a whole ship to come for them, but when that ship came,
the joint military was waiting for them. Now, this wasn’t the Squadron.
Their job had not yet begun. Regular soldiers could handle this mission. All
they needed to do first was to get that vessel, and figure out how to
use it. They did their best to not damage the ship in the battle, and not
kill too many of the Ochivari, but losses were suffered on both sides. To
open a portal massive enough to accommodate the ship, a certain number of
Ochivari had to be sacrificed, but when the homefront battle was over, that
number was not high enough. They would have to breed more. But would such
offspring not be innocent? This ethics debate only further delayed the
realization of their hopes to start a war. It delayed it for years, all the
while, the Squadron, and the rest of the military servicemen across the
world, continued to train. They never knew whether the Ochivari would
eventually send another ship to investigate what went wrong with the first
one. Time travel was confusing. No more Ochivari came through, and by the
time they figured out the ethics, the new Ochivari were all considered
adults. Not all of them were bad, but enough of them were. These were
sacrificed so that the Squadron could go off and attack the Ochivari staging
area in Efilverse. The good ones, meanwhile, stayed behind, and were mostly
successfully integrated into Earthan society, where they learned to value
life, and reject their ancestors’ crusade against nearly all civilization.
The Squadron didn’t win, but they never expected to. All they hoped to do
was inspire a revolution. They did.
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